The Singer, Not the Song

In oral storytelling, the performance of the talesmen is just as important as the tale that he tells.

Bardelys had begun to listen to recordings of volunteers reading classical, public domain books. He had begun with a reading of Rafael Sabatini’s famous novel, The Sea Hawk.

Sabatini had been one of his favorite authors when Bardelys was a lad. Imagine then his chagrin when the person who had volunteered to read this book had so much trouble performing the tale. Groups of words and phrases were not spoken together as they should have been; and odd, archaic phrases were pronounced strangely (at least in the ears of Bardelys).

The result was a tale just barely worth following – indeed it was just barely able to be followed.

It struck him then, just how important the performance of an oral tale is. It seemed to him now that the performance was perhaps even more important than the tale that was to be told.

And yet he had to consider the Sabatini had written his book in order for it to be read, and not spoken aloud. Sabatini’s talesmanship is so good that the tale could very well stand a good recitation. However, that was not the author’s primary intention when he wrote it, and Sabatini’s love for archaic phrases and words of the historical period would make it difficult for any modern reader to read the tale aloud. Moreover, it was twice the challenge for an American to read archaic British phrases, such that Sabatini loved to employ in order to give his readers more of an authentic flavor of the time and place of which he wrote.

It is also true, that the true oral storyteller does not read his tales – he performs them, he does not recite them. He does not read off a page, nor does he recite from memory. Instead, the true oral storyteller knows very well in his heart the key signposts of his story, along with side trips and alternative choices along the path to the eventual end. He then adjusts his performance (both in his manner, his tone and the words he uses and the exact shape of the story) according to the audience as he finds them, and as he sees them reacting to his tale.

Who among us, Bardelys wondered, could not tell immediately the difference in tone of voice in the matter when an amateur reads something off a page and when he tells you something in conversation?

Bardelys followed this line of thought to its ultimate conclusion: for it meant that in the future, talesmen who want to record their stories in radio or podcast form, ought not to read them as they are written, but rather, holding the story events firmly in mind, these talesmen should simply tell us the tale naturally, almost conversationally.

Bruno Bettelheim mentions this in his wonderful analysis of fairy tales – how important it is for a parent to tell his children fairy tales, rather than for him to read the tales. Bettelheim, of course, was at least in part interested in the parent engaging with the child rather than sticking his nose in the pages of a book in the mumbling out phrases as he found them, or even sticking the book in front of the child’s face and reading the phrases with a finger functioning as the bouncing ball of old time musical movies.

And yet, the same applies to a real oral storyteller, whether he tell his tales face to face with his audience, or whether he record his tales to be distributed.

The oral tale is a performance, and not merely a transcription or recording.

(Composed by dictation Tuesday 30 September 2008)

Short and Long – Happy and Sad

One structural difference between folktales and modern genre novels

Bardelys was thinking on the Russian folktales, when he realized something new: they were backwards. Not only did they have happy endings (and sad beginnings) but the inflection point was only about one-third of the way in, rather than one-third of the way from the end.

In standard screenplay and playwriting schools, he had been taught that if the ending was to be a happy one, the Second Curtain must be sad. This is the ‘black moment’ that many screenwriting teachers harp on, that had been drummed into Bardelys’s very soul in his tutelage in Southern California. It had now become an elementary notion in his approach to talesmanship.

But the Russian folktales had a different plan. Their structure introduced the hero, and quickly brought him to a dire passage. From this point the fate turns kind, and we follow the hero’s long ascent, enjoying every turn along the way.

Another difference is the simplicity and smoothness of the descent and ascent. In screenplay and modern novel, the rise and fall are both jagged, and more natural or even, Bardelys thought wryly, ‘organic.’ In a general rising movement, there are subordinate ups and downs; they also appear in a general falling movement.

Part of the difference, Bardelys was convinced, lay in the relative lengths of the tales. The folktale can be told in an evening – even an hour – even a half-hour. The novel is a somewhat more filling and substantial meal. Indeed, the novel developed in its heyday as a serial, published daily or weekly, and written in instalments. It might take a full year for a long Dickens tale to reach its final periodical instalment.

Thus, the oral tale must quickly get to its point and move on to its end. But the novel must undulate, variegate its pitch and movement, must rise and fall and rise again, must play with its readers’ emotions.

Bardelys remembered one description of the writing of a novel: like walking from Barcelona to the Pacific coast – on your knees. Something of the sort was also the experience of the one reading the novel. It is a long passage.

This also plays its part: the struggle must be won, if a happy ending is to eventuate, but it must be won honestly and at some effort, some cost. The reader must feel a real danger that the happy ending might not come to pass.

Here again, Bardelys saw a difference, not in the forms, but in the wider context of the different audiences for the folktale and the novel. Novel-readers have become an awfully jaded lot. And a sophisticated one. We all know the patterns, for we have met them all many times before. Thus it takes great skill and cleverness, and earnest effort, on the talesman’s part, to (at least in part) convince us that the hero might not get his just desserts at tale’s end. This requires a long struggle on the hero’s part, and it needs that things get worse for him, worse and worse, and more and more dire, until, at last…

The folktale is like a cookie.

The novel is like a banquet.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, September 29, 2008)

Finesse and Force

A vital difference between old folktales and new.

Another thing that struck Bardelys about the Russian fairy tales is how gentle they were. The hapless (but moral and goodhearted) heroes and heroines of these tales never fight for their rights – they never oppose evil or tyranny with brute strength. Indeed, they never even contest their more arrogant siblings’ maltreatment of them.

Instead, the heroes of these tales succeed through cleverness and (even more often) through the assistance of some magical, semi-divine helpers. These helpers act as cosmic instruments of karma or the will of heaven. There is no sense of Christianity behind the tales that Bardelys had read so far; they might as well have been told by pagans as by pious devout devotees of the Russian Orthodox Church. (This might be quite true: the original composers of these yarns might well have lived outside Russia or before Christianity came to Russia – or even before Christianity itself was born.)

He was struck likewise by the contrast of these tales with modern day fantasy tales, which almost universally appeal to brute force (or magical force, which is equated with physical, brute strength in the symbolic language of these tales) as the one true means that the good can use to overcome the evil.

In this also, Bardelys could see the difference between tales that arise out of a population that is truly oppressed and those that arise out of a bourgeois mentality of a dominant, even ruling class. The poor – the truly poor and oppressed – must tread lightly when complaining of any ill-treatment they suffer. If they speak too openly or too loudly, they risk the knock at the door, the boot in the face, the long trip to the prison camp, or torment and death. The ruling class on the contrary is only too eager to assert its rights and carry a big stick.

Alas, he thought, not only is literacy failing, but freedom is also dwindling, so that in future what will be popular are the new representatives of these old oral folktales, with all their simplicity, their escapist happy endings, their gentleness, their cleverness, and their inability to address directly the injustice and grinding oppression the ruling class has in store for all of us.

(Composed by dictation Sunday 28 September 2008)

The Roots of Romance

He finds out where the beginning of genre fiction lies

Bardelys walked along the street, watching the river that ran between the stone wall and the road bed. Normally this was a six foot stretch of grass with a buttress of weeds at the foot of the wall. After two days of tropical rain, however, the water ran up to a foot deep down to the culvert and wormed its way beneath the street to the ditch on the other side of the road.

Bardelys stopped about midway up the road. He could hear quite distinctly the sound of a waterfall, although no such thing could be seen. This was the main point where the water drained out of the field beneath the stone wall. About ten meters to the north he could hear another, lesser waterfall.

He went back to the house shaking his head and wondering what could be done to slow down the runoff of water when the rains were this heavy. Maybe sculpting the ground beneath the hayfield in keyline patterns would do the trick, but it would mean a lot of work digging and sculpting and hauling earth.

Recently he had been reading old Russian folk tales as adapted by the British children’s author Arthur Ransome. Bardelys had been struck at how close the tales came to despair over poverty and starvation. In tale after tale, it seemed, families were in imminent peril of starving to death, and in every family they faced the prospect of killing one of their children in order for the family as a whole to survive.

Take for example the tale entitled ‘Frost.’ Here an old man loses his first wife and marries again a woman who has two children of her own. This makes three daughters in the household, and the stepmother as is usually the case decides that the daughter of the first wife must go. She tells her husband to take the child deep into the woods to a tall fir tree, where Frost will come to be the girl’s bridegroom.

Bardelys had felt a chill run up his spine when he read this tale. Even though the setting was explicitly Christian, and Christians have always condemned and forbidden the exposure of infants, this small fairy tale shows the old man leaving his daughter to freeze to death as night comes on. The tale becomes quite explicit at this point, (at least in this translation and adaptation) because the old woman sends her husband back to the fir tree in the morning out of what seems to be sheer malice and cruelty. The older man fully expects to find his daughter’s corpse frozen stiff in the frost.

Instead, as it usually does in folk and fairy tales, the daughter is alive and well and has even prospered, because Frost has actually spoken with her and been impressed by her goodness and her pluck. Therefore he has given her a rich fur coat, jewelry, and other wedding gifts.

The cruel stepmother immediately once her daughters to share in the bounty, and so she sends them off in the evening with the husband so that they too might be wedded to the demon. Naturally, these spoiled and ugly girls don’t please Frost in the slightest, and they do end up frozen stiff when the old man goes to collect them on the following morning.

Was not in this, Bardelys wondered, the roots of all Romantic literature? And was not this kind of tale the very origin of ‘escapist’ fiction?

In real life, Bardelys was certain that almost every child and infant exposed to the elements had died. He supposed that the best that could have happened to them would’ve been the very ugly fate of slavery, toil, and prostitution, and death would only have been postponed or a few painful, miserably ugly years.

In tales it works the other way. Even the people who knew better – the very peasants were forced to give up their own children or knew neighbors who had done so – spun these tales with their happy endings. Their happy and unbelievable endings. Bardelys supposed that it could go no other way. Life was cruel enough. And there was no controlling life, or else no child would ever die. Tales were something else. Tales could be controlled, tales didn’t have to be so cruel. Tales could have happy endings.

And so the old talesmen of bitter harsh hard times could not bring themselves, could not bear to tell ‘realistic’ tales where the children froze to death. Bardelys knew that these tales were ‘escapist’ in nature. Why not escape, when life is so dreadful?

And, he thought, maybe the converse was also true: only fat people in rich happy times could afford to tell tales of ugliness and sorrow with painful, unhappy endings, in which good people suffered and died and the wicked triumphed.

‘Realism’ is a luxury that only well to do bourgeois families can afford. ‘Fantasy’ and ‘escapist literature’ is what poor and suffering people need to be able to endure the lives they lead.

(Composed by dictation Saturday 27 September 2008)

Clockwork and Character

A few words on the eternal war between plot and character in the movies.

A few years ago, Mel Gibson start in a movie entitled What Do Women Want? This was the movie that first made me feel as though the pace of the story with all its incidents and episodes had been crammed into a running time that was far too short. I got the sense of a clock that had been wound up far too tightly, so that its spring was forcing the mechanism to unwind in an overly hasty manner.

There was in short not a single pause or moment to reflect or draw breath – either for the characters or the audience.

Now, I could defend the practice of this movie by referring to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. In those times it was considered de rigueur for comedies to proceed at a frenetic, even frantic pace. The breathlessness of the pace was thought to enhance laughter in the audience, I suppose, but really underneath that lay the motive to stop the audience from thinking – because if we think about what’s going on in those movies, we will quickly realize how absurd the promise and motivations are of all concerned.

What Do Women Want? could be taken as an example of a screwball comedy, but it also wants to say something and examine the personalities of the characters involved. Also, the movie employs a central device out of fantasy and takes up valuable running time trying to explain or justify this device whereby Mel Gibson’s character is transformed into a woman. (I think this is one of my strongest objections to the movie – the idea is so fantastic, and the reason behind having this device work is so obvious, that we don’t need any more justification for it than its own result.)

The character Mel Gibson plays is certainly stressed out, but I don’t think that’s any reason to give the audience a headache.

I usually side with those who say that plot should predominate over character in the construction of stories. And here I seemed to be saying that plot has so overwhelmed the characters in the movie suffers from it. But I am also suggesting that the audience cannot be pushed too hard throughout the running time of any film.

Indeed, ever since George Lucas finished his first Star Wars trilogy, and he and Steven Spielberg teamed up to create the first of the Indiana Jones movies, there has been a dominant theory in a lot of Hollywood entertainment films – the idea that the film is not in fact a story, but works more like an amusement park ride – a roller coaster is the usual metaphor.

A roller coaster has built into the ride pauses between plunges. The cars slow down as they are dragged toward the top of the peaks and speed up as they descend. The riders get the stuffing scared out of them on the drops but they get a chance to breathe again on the ascents. So it would seem that a lot of filmmakers who profess to make their movies work like roller coasters don’t even understand how roller coasters work.

No audience can laugh full out without pausing for the entire running length of a feature length film. If we laugh too hard in the beginning, our diaphragm muscles begin to ache and get sore – it actually starts to hurt to laugh. We need a break in order to laugh again comfortably.

This is not entirely a modern day mistake, because I remember a similar reaction when I watched the Howard Hawks movie, I Was a Male War Bride.

But it does seem to be a distressingly frequent aspect of today’s Hollywood movies. Joel Silver, the famous producer, is said to have wanted an explosion every few pages in every script he was producing. Perhaps not a literal explosion, but some big action that would take place – in the case of a comedy like What Do Women Want? the ‘explosion’ would be a gag, pratfall, or some other laugh-inducing device.

The effect on me watching this movie was that I felt increasingly alienated from the – it seemed as though the movie were moving farther away from me, or I was moving farther away from it, so that I could see the clockwork spinning with all its wheels inside wheels – I wasn’t seeing characters and I wasn’t sympathizing, let alone empathizing, with any of them. This was a shame because the movie boasts a pretty good cast who were doing their best, and it’s certainly true that the movie had something to say.

When you watch movies (especially big budget action movies) be on the lookout for this ‘overwound clockwork’ phenomenon.

Ultimately I believe that this failing is a failing of the scripts involved. The writers of these films (along with the producers giving the writers notes) and not trying to include too many episodes, characters, and devices into the film script and then, faced with limits on running times, they try to pack everything in when they edit the movie. This invariably means that moments of quietude, reflection, reaction, and relief are the ones that are cut, because they are not strictly essential to understanding the plot, and the producers are reluctant to do away with any frame depicting one of the expensive, spectacular stunts or explosions (or potential gags).

This is a limitation of theater and movies and not, in theory at least, a limitation on novels, which can run as long as you want because the reader digests a story in a novel over the course of many sittings rather than a single sitting in which he digests a play or movie. And yet in practice even the novel has limits – every story has an ideal length (or rather I suppose a range of lengths) which it supports. If a story is told in too few words it will seem thin and of less consequence than it deserves. And if a story is told in too many words it will seem padded or even boring, all bluster and roar, and of greater consequence than it deserves.

(Composed by dictation Friday 26 September 2008)

Numbers Will Kill You

When accuracy falls just a little bit, aggravation soars

I’ve been dictating to Dragon NaturallySpeaking in a different room, and the accuracy has suffered. This has altered how I speak, so that I don’t speak normally – something that also hurts accuracy, but when my trust in the software falls, I don’t want to have to scan back over large swaths of text to find and fix errors.

It seemed that there’s a mistake in every line. Then I realized that if the accuracy of the program falls as ‘low’ as 90%, it will make one mistake every sentence.

Every sentence needs fixing.

And that is an accuracy boasting 90%.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, September 25, 2008)

Willow and Oak

Looking for peace in troubled times

(from a conversation) –

‘I saw Bon Voyage tonight, a comedy set in 1940 when France fell to Germany. It was very well constructed, one of those scripts where there are a dozen characters all bouncing off one another like pachinko balls. The construction is what’s nice. But it took the side of the resistance, and was against the collaborators. I’m not sure that’s the Tao way.’

‘Why does Tao way matter here? One of the characters is into Taoism? Or are you talking about something else?’

‘Well, there are a couple of famous metaphors in Taoism, I think from Tao Te Ching, but maybe from Chuang-tze. In general Taoists were contrasted to Confucius and his followers. Confucius stressed that every intelligent man should seek to influence the state and join the ruler as advisor, be a local mayor or whatever they called them, join the general administration. Lao-tze, in a famous, and probably apocryphal, story, met with Confucius and derided this approach: The Taoist way was to retreat from the turmoil of the world, tend your own garden and let everyone else tend his.

‘The two famous metaphors are:

1. ‘Be the willow, not the oak tree.’ In winter when heavy snows fall, the willow bends low, and when the snows melt, the willow springs back up. But the oak tree, which seems so much stronger than the soft willow, will crack and break under the heavy snow, and in spring when the snow melts the oak branches will still be broken.
2. ‘Water vs. Stone’ Stone of course is harder than water. But over time a tiny stream will cut a channel in the hardest stone. Water is yielding, and stone unyielding, but water still manages to erode and overcome stone.’

These two metaphors exemplify the Taoist social and political courses of action. If your country is conquered, as France was, then the ‘oak tree’ and ‘stone’ types would advocate continued battle, underground resistance, blowing things up, assassinating German officials and French collaborators. The ‘willow’ and ‘water’ types would simply ignore the conquerors as much as possible, as they had ignored their own French leaders. In time, the German Empire would crumble, and the peasants and farmer-philosophers would go on as they always had.

So nothing in the movie mentioned Taoism, but it was holding up the French politicians who formed the Pétain collaborationist government as weak, traitors, double-dealing, spineless and unprincipled; and de gaulle and the French resistance fighters were seen as moral, heroic, doing the right thing, in fighting back.

And I was looking at this from my pacifist Taoist point of view, and questioning both the film’s conventional ideology and my own point of view.

Those French Taoists (if there were any such) would have been standing by as French jews were sent off to be killed. By not fighting, are they not helping the evil?

I don’t know, in other words, just trying to sort out my own philosophy.

I think there is a smart, philosophical Taoist way to withdraw, and a more venal, corrupt politician way of collaborating. The French minister (‘Beaufort’) who stands for the collaborationists is compared to a movie actress, with whom he is sleeping, both spinning all sorts of self-serving lies just to get a piece of the pie and hold onto it, whether it’s from a leftist French government or the German imperialists. Such an approach is very different from, say, the French version of the Taoist, a country priest who advocates non-violence, but who will help any jews hide out from being captured whenever he can.

There is in Chuang-tze a constant note of mockery and laughter at those earnest Confucians who try to change the world. It’s a little cynical, but it might be the wisest course. After all, if everybody just tended his garden, there wouldn’t be any wars.

The problems arise when not everybody tends his gardens, and war does come. What then?

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, September 25, 2008)

The Lonesome Pine Who Is Normal

Can a Lonesome Pine end up being a normal man?

Today I want to consider a Lonesome Pine who is perfectly normal in all other respects, and ask the question `Can such a fellow be normal?'

I think it's perfectly possible for a person who is completely socialized and well-adjusted' to want to write stories, and to start telling stories without an audience. Indeed, I think most writers begin this way (not that most writers can be considered to bewell-adjusted').

The question then arises, whether this person, having written some stories that he likes, would not seek out an audience. Wouldn't he (being normal after all) want to gain some approval from an audience? Wouldn't he want to share his good story with an audience?

It's possible that such a person would not have access to an audience – at least for a short period of time. Or he might find that all the people around him don't share his taste in stories, and so he doesn't think that they'd be interested in the stories that he tells. This person might still be perfectly `normal' in all our usual sense of the word, only finds himself thrust into a different culture or society.

Let us take for example a man whose business causes him to travel to a distant country. There he conducts his trade and grows fluent in the native tongue. All the same he feels nostalgic for his own country and his own tongue. He begins to set down (solely for his own amusement and pleasure) a series of stories about his childhood and hometown and the people he knew there. He quite understandably expects that the people amongst whom he is presently living would not share his interest or appreciation in news stories of people they've never known, a culture they've never experienced, and a language that they don't speak. It might even fall out that this exile or emigrant must spend the rest of his life in this foreign country and never return home again, and so he continues to tell his stories, writing them down carefully and lovingly and showing them to no one.

How many of such men would be able to continue this practice? How many would never copy their stories over and send them back home to the people he knows there, to share them?

Now let us say that there exists a perfectly normal human being who invents fictions for his own amusement, and writes them down as stories for himself. He enjoys these stories and he enjoys telling them. To himself, however, he admits and recognizes that the stories aren't a very good and are not publishable in any respect. He keeps these stories to himself for that reason.

In the old times, such a man would undoubtedly be called a dreamer and a fantasist and a wool-gatherer. Could such a man qualify as normal? Perhaps not entirely normal – not 100% at least – but he might qualify as existing on the bubble' at the fringes and outer edges of what the society considers normal. That is to say, in all other respects of his life he conforms admirably to acceptable normal behavior. Only in this one aspect of his life does he differ from anyone else. And then we could say that this one small idiosyncrasy is not enough to brand him asabnormal.' Every man is permitted his small quirks and follies, after all.

On the other hand that scenario doesn't seem very likely to me. It is possible but improbable. Far more likely is the scenario of the wild-eyed loner, the strange, unsociable, abnormal `lone wolf' who feeds his own fantasies and bizarre tastes, shamefully, telling himself weird unwholesome stories.

The process of telling unusual tales as a hobby or avocation is well known in history. I suppose if we look back in time before the current commercial world developed, before all literary ambitions were subsumed into the vortex of commercial publishing, we would find that the idea that someone would want to `tell tales' and spin yarns for publication and profit might strike everyone as a little bit nutty.

And yet I can't somehow get beyond the idea that everyone who tells tales would want an audience to hear them. Nor can I get beyond the idea that everyone who wants to tell tales began as a member of the audience listening to someone else tell tales, and it was only out of his own enjoyment of hearing tales told that he conceived the idea of telling his own or repeating those tales he had heard earlier.

(Composed by dictation Tuesday 23 September 2008)

Isolation and Social Discourse

How it is that the isolated writer will become more and more extreme

The Lonesome Pine is a term that I'm using to describe writers who do not write for publication or for any other reader than themselves. These writers are a breed apart from all the rest of us, even though I think almost all writers begin this way, and it's only later that they begin to get a glimmer of hope, aspiration, or intention to be published and widely known.

`Abandon all hope...'

There are some writers probably never have any idea that any other human soul will ever read or hear what they have written. The image that comes to my mind is of a person whose mind doesn't work the way most of our minds work: he might be called insane or mentally unbalanced. He might be schizophrenic. Or he might be compulsive. In any case, his writing tends to be more therapeutic than anything else – it serves as a sort of pressure valve to vent the excess thoughts and concerns that he carries with him at all times.

I think a lot of people go through this sort of experience at one time or another in their lives. I associate it mostly with adolescence and the ache of teenage years, also we love affairs, and intense love for someone with whom the writer cannot communicate, someone the writer dares not approach. For one reason or another, the writer believes that his feelings are too precious and too potent to be revealed to anyone. He feels cut off from other human society, or else he would be writing and speaking and expressing all his emotions to other people.

Adolescence and amorous heartache are temporary conditions, so most of us when we endure these phases do not do so for very long. Any flirtation that we might have with this state of being a Lonesome Pine, therefore, is brief, and we probably forget what it was like after a few years have passed.

But if we consider the difference between the infatuated loner and the person who is also infatuated but who has friends, then I think we begin to understand (or at least approach understanding) of the writer who writes for many years of his life all along without any hope or intention that anyone else will read what he has written.

This is where the connection with madness comes in.

When you're able to `vent' to other people (and the more the merrier), you are also forced to listen to them giving you advice, and commenting on your own complaints. Through this process you gain some deal notion of how other people see you and see your situation – and the way other people see your situation is never as extreme or hopeless or glorious or tragic or doomed as you yourself believe.

This process is related to the more general process of `socialization.' Anyone who is part of a community will come over time to reflect that community in all of its values, as well as its idiosyncratic modes of behavior, speech, and attitude. At the same time, every individual member of that community affects the general outlook of the community. This is a kind of dialogue. The people at the extremes and fringes of the community try to pull it towards themselves, while the people in the center try to resist this centrifugal motion and bring everyone closer to their common central ground.

The world of literature is a sort of community in itself – or maybe we should call it a collection of communities. For every genre and subcategory of literature makes its own community that might have very little commerce with other communities and genres. So-called `hard science fiction' devotees probably don't read many Regency romances, and vice versa.

The process of `socialization' in any given literary community results in certain styles coming to predominate, and the typical clichés of the genre. Styles come and go, and there is a lot of interactivity going on not only between the writers and readers but also amongst the writers themselves. This will vary according to how intensely the fans of the genre feel and how active the fans are into creating an ecosystem around this genre.

New writers for the genre will mostly come out of its own fans — people who know the history of the genre and like the genre for what it is and would like to keep it the way it is, albeit with some changes that usually reflect general social changes in the greater world as well as new generations coming onto the scene. All these new writers have a vested interest in the life and vitality and gradual, incremental evolution of the genre. As a body, the fans and writers within the genre's community will seek to maintain a coherence of form and content.

Another factor in the `socialization' of the writer in general has to do with simple mechanics. Publishing as an industrial concern gains greater efficiencies when it achieves and abides by standardization. This involves factors like the available consistency and a makeup of paper stock, page size, color of ink, binding processes to be used in books, and all the equipment that is used in manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the product — the books.

There is another factor in this socialization' that is probably more particularly a part of literature. This is a high number offussbudgets' that inevitably cling to words, grammar, dictionaries, and all things fusty and academic. These are the people who insist that everything be spelled the same way, and that all punctuation adhere to certain laws. These are also the people who seem to regard the definitions of words not as things that people have arbitrarily decided they mean, and can change at any time, but rather as items handed down from the All-High.

Against all this stands the Lonesome Pine. Since this writer never intends to be published or even to seek publication of his work, he never enters into a dialogue with the greater community of literature, or with any of the smaller communities of the genre. He never deals with a copy editor. In addition, there are other factors that have driven him into the state that we call the Lonesome Pine. He is probably not very adept at dealing with people in social situations. He probably resists all efforts of those around him (with whom he absolutely must deal) to bring him, as it were, `into the fold' and be like everybody else.

Therefore, the Lonesome Pine will probably relish spelling things differently and using a grammar system of all his own. Instead of trying to make his self printed and self-bound volumes look like any other commercial book, he will take delight in making it look very different. He will use colored paper — and many different colors — and he will use paper of different sizes. He will change fonts often. He will include illustration, and these too will be different as different as he can make them. He will not be bound by any literary conventions and since his work will never be touched by any editor's blue pencil, his stories will go all over the place, and he might even end up with different protagonists than the ones he began with.

All of these are the outer considerations of the work and life of the Lonesome Pine. The inner life remains out of bounds and beyond our imagining — or rather I should say, that the Lonesome Pine varies from individual to individual too widely for anyone to be able to describe one portrait and say with any confidence that it stands in for the class as a whole.

(Composed by dictation Monday 22 September 2008)

Lonesome Pine

Beginning a voyage into the land of the solitary talesman

I would like to continue to explore one of the topics I touched on yesterday – namely, what it means to tell tales when no one hears you.

I don't believe that I've seen any texts or textbooks or even any articles that discuss this. Everything that I read about the craft of writing assumes that the writer wishes to be read. He wants and needs an audience, and desires either fame or fortune or both.

And yet (as I noted yesterday) all of us talesmen begin our careers without an audience. As children, perhaps, we make up tales and stories, daydreaming fantasies to get us through the day. Moreover at a more basic level, we all dream – and every dream is a story we tell ourselves. Many people carry on diaries and journals as a means of self exploration and psychological healing perhaps.

We also tell ourselves tales without even realizing it. I mean by that that we reconstruct the events of our day that most trouble us, and narrate to ourselves a new version of events which makes the good things better, and justifies our actions while vilifying the actions of our perceived antagonists and enemies.

Most of us who wanted to be writers were in the beginning voracious readers. We read and enjoy so many stories that we began to want to tell our own stories, which would combine all of the elements of the best tales that we love, while correcting all the flaws that we thought we saw in them.

The plight of the solitary writer is one that I think will be touching more and more of us in the near future of America. This is a country which boasts of fewer and fewer readers and more and more writers. It is a country whose literacy rate is declining, and his people admit in nationwide polls that they read for pleasure less every year.

Just look at the numbers – hundreds of thousands of books are written, fewer and fewer are read.

Who is the Lonesome Pine?

He is most likely not a `he' at all – most likely the Lonesome Pine is a woman. I presume this is so because more women than men read fiction and so it's likely that more of them enjoy tales and would therefore want to tell them. I will not speculate on any basic psychological differences between men and women although it stands to reason that they do exist because the structures of our brains differ between men and women. But I imagine that there is a lot of common ground that both men and women Lonesome Pines share.

The Lonesome Pine stands on a bluff in the wind high above scrub country in the late afternoon, in the last light of day. It looks out over the distance, trembling slightly in the wind, and it imagines what might have been in that barren landscape far below in the distant past or in a possible presence or in a potential future.

The wind whispers through the needles of the Lonesome Pine. And no one hears those whispers but the Lonesome Pine itself.

The tales you tell yourself may serve all the general purposes of tales you tell to others. They may amuse, entertain, shock, excite, thrill, chill, arouse, exasperate, taste bitter or sweet. But they may do more.

The process of telling yourself tale is an interactive one. You are constantly gathering feedback, both as reader and writer, both as composer and audience. The reader in this case knows everything that the writer knows, just as soon as the writer knows it. It is therefore difficult to surprise the reader, without attempting to play tricks on yourself (perhaps unconsciously).

I wonder: does the Lonesome Pine need the illusion that he has an audience? Or does he need to face the truth, that he doesn't have an audience, and never will.

I don't know the answer to that one. I'm going to have to think about it for awhile and contemplate this whole issue a good deal longer.

(Composed by dictation Sunday 21 September 2008)

The Shape of Print

What we see on a page is not as it has always been

Sometimes, when I’m dictating into voice recognition software, I forget to include some punctuation – earlier today, for example, I was putting in commas, periods, and parentheses and dashes just fine, but for about a page I forgot to note where any of the paragraphs began or ended. The result was simply a great blob of text.

This put me in mind of a couple of things.

First, it struck me that there are no paragraphs in spoken tales. And second, it reminded me that in the beginning, there was no such thing as a paragraph.

I speak here of the evolution of European printing. In the Middle Ages, before the printing press was invented, the monks of the abbeys did make books, binding separate leaves together between covers. Each single folio was rather expensive – under some conditions, each page was made from a single lamb’s skin. The complete edition of the Bible, running a few hundred pages, would have necessitated slaughtering an entire herd of baby lambs. Not only that, but each page was written on only one side as I understand it.

The ‘real estate’ of the manuscript page was, therefore, going for an extremely high premium. Every square centimeter was like gold. The monks in the scriptorium therefore, did their best to ‘pack’ every page with as many words as they could – while keeping their strokes large enough so as to be legible.

Every page therefore was a complete ‘block’ of text. There was no punctuation, no paragraphs, no indentation. Instead, whole sections of text would be demarcated by an illuminated majiscule.

Later inventions included not only the printing press, but also paper, whose manufacturing secret Marco Polo brought back from China. In the centuries that have followed since then, paper has become cheaper and cheaper to the point where mass-market books could be sold for an extraordinarily small sum of money. Even though these are cheap, they still take advantage of several innovations in the art of printing – or rather, the art of laying out the page.

Today, we are accustomed to seeing:

• sentences separated by periods
• and marked off with capital letters at their beginning
• other innovations include parenthetical asides
• and notes set off by dashes.
• Paragraphs are indented
• or (in the case of HTML markup) additional leading between the lines.
• Dialogue is set off by quotation marks.
• Sections are either numbered
• or set off by blank lines
• or, when sections end at the bottom of the page,
• with a blank line and a series of asterisks
• or some other ornamental mark.

And of course, we also have lists:

1. definition lists,
2. bullet lists,
3. enumerated lists.

We set off larger sections of texts with chapters: each chapter begins on a separate page, usually under a header with additional whitespace at the top of the page. We also have even larger sections called ‘parts’ or ‘books’ each of which contains more than one chapter.

All these assist us readers to ‘decode and decipher’ the page very rapidly and easily. Could you imagine a newspaper without columns, headlines, paragraphs, or punctuation? A nightmare to read.

(You can get an idea of what this might be like by looking at the bottom of this blog post, or I take the entire posting and, while keeping sentence punctuation intact, eliminate all paragraph-level distinctions.)

Now, as to that first point...

An oral storyteller has none of this at his command. He doesn’t have capital letters, small letters, periods, semicolons, dashes, page breaks, bullet lists, blank lines, whitespace, or any of the other devices that printers and publishers have developed over the centuries to make it so easy for us to read printed text.

Instead, the oral storyteller has other arrows in his quiver. He has tone of voice. He can inject pauses in between words, phrases, that vary considerably in length – a longer pause will indicate not only a more dramatic point in the story, but also a break in organization of thought that is larger than a paragraph.

A paragraph ends with a longer pause than that which ends a sentence. A section ends with an even longer pause, a chapter uses a very very long pause, and the section of the story which is larger than a chapter will probably be told at another sitting.

The oral storyteller has other tools he can work with as well.

If he is sitting down, he can stand. If he is standing up, he can sit. He can gesture with his arms. He can turn his head or his whole body. He can look away from his audience, and he can look back at his audience. He can take a pull at his pipe. (George Burns used to remark that the cigars that he smoked on stage were his best friends for controlling the timing of his comedy routines.)

The oral storyteller can walk about, and do other physical actions that really take him into the realm of the stage actor or performer. He can whisper – declaim – shout – speak slyly and suggestively – boastfully – angrily – laughingly.

But if we are interested mainly in the sound of the storyteller’s voice alone, we must set aside all gesture and physical actions, and instead think only of the voice: both in terms of the timing of phrases as well as the delivery of words and lines.

If I’m going to dictate my stories aloud the way Raymond Chandler did, my stories will tend to suit oral storytelling better than written storytelling – both for myself and is the author and four my readers/listeners.

If on the other hand, I were to write my tales out on a keyboard or longhand, the result would suit better the written model both for myself and my readers. When read aloud, those tales might not sound very good, or make much sense, or be as effective as they would be if I had composed them from the beginning orally.

(Composed by dictation Saturday 20 September 2008)

---

Sometimes, when I’m dictating into voice recognition software, I forget to include some punctuation – earlier today, for example, I was putting in commas, periods, and parentheses and dashes just fine, but for about a page I forgot to note where any of the paragraphs began or ended. The result was simply a great blob of text. This put me in mind of a couple of things. First, it struck me that there are no paragraphs in spoken tales. And second, it reminded me that in the beginning, there was no such thing as a paragraph. I speak here of the evolution of European printing. In the Middle Ages, before the printing press was invented, the monks of the abbeys did make books, binding separate leaves together between covers. Each single folio was rather expensive – under some conditions, each page was made from a single lamb’s skin. The complete edition of the Bible, running a few hundred pages, would have necessitated slaughtering an entire herd of baby lambs. Not only that, but each page was written on only one side as I understand it. The ‘real estate’ of the manuscript page was, therefore, going for an extremely high premium. Every square centimeter was like gold. The monks in the scriptorium therefore, did their best to ‘pack’ every page with as many words as they could – while keeping their strokes large enough so as to be legible. Every page therefore was a complete ‘block’ of text. There was no punctuation, no paragraphs, no indentation. Instead, whole sections of text would be demarcated by an illuminated majiscule. Later inventions included not only the printing press, but also paper, whose manufacturing secret Marco Polo brought back from China. In the centuries that have followed since then, paper has become cheaper and cheaper to the point where mass-market books could be sold for an extraordinarily small sum of money. Even though these are cheap, they still take advantage of several innovations in the art of printing – or rather, the art of laying out the page. Today, we are accustomed to seeing sentences separated by periods, and marked off with capital letters at their beginning; other innovations include parenthetical asides and notes set off by dashes. Paragraphs are indented or (in the case of HTML markup) additional leading between the lines. Dialogue is set off by quotation marks. Sections are either numbered or set off by blank lines or, when sections and at the bottom of the page, with a blank line and a series of asterisks or some other ornamental mark. And of course, we also have lists: definition lists, bullet lists, enumerated lists. We set off larger sections of texts with chapters: each chapter begins on a separate page, usually under a header with additional whitespace at the top of the page. We also have even larger sections called ‘parts’ or ‘books’ each of which contains more than one chapter. All these assist us readers to ‘decode and decipher’ the page very rapidly and easily. Could you imagine a newspaper without columns, headlines, paragraphs, or punctuation? A nightmare to read. (You can get an idea of what this might be like by looking at the bottom of this blog post, or I take the entire posting and, while keeping sentence punctuation intact, eliminate all paragraph-level distinctions.) Now, as to that first point... An oral storyteller has none of this at his command. He doesn’t have capital letters, small letters, periods, semicolons, dashes, page breaks, bullet lists, blank lines, whitespace, or any of the other devices that printers and publishers have developed over the centuries to make it so easy for us to read printed text. Instead, the oral storyteller has other arrows in his quiver. He has tone of voice. He can inject pauses in between words, phrases, that vary considerably in length – a longer pause will indicate not only a more dramatic point in the story, but also a break in organization of thought that is larger than a paragraph. A paragraph ends with a longer pause than that which ends a sentence. A section ends with an even longer pause, a chapter uses a very very long pause, and the section of the story which is larger than a chapter will probably be told at another sitting. The oral storyteller has other tools he can work with as well. If he is sitting down, he can stand. If he is standing up, he can sit. He can gesture with his arms. He can turn his head or his whole body. He can look away from his audience, and he can look back at his audience. He can take a pull at his pipe. (George Burns used to remark that the cigars that he smoked on stage were his best friends for controlling the timing of his comedy routines.) The oral storyteller can walk about, and do other physical actions that really take him into the realm of the stage actor or performer. He can whisper – declaim – shout – speak slyly and suggestively – boastfully – angrily – laughingly. But if we are interested mainly in the sound of the storyteller’s voice alone, we must set aside all gesture and physical actions, and instead think only of the voice: both in terms of the timing of phrases as well as the delivery of words and lines. If I’m going to dictate my stories aloud the way Raymond Chandler did, my stories will tend to suit oral storytelling better than written storytelling – both for myself and is the author and four my readers/listeners. If on the other hand, I were to write my tales out on a keyboard or longhand, the result would suit better the written model both for myself and my readers. When read aloud, those tales might not sound very good, or make much sense, or be as effective as they would be if I had composed them from the beginning orally.

The Three Paths of a Talesman

Three ways to study, three ways to learn, three goals, three endings – all of them different.

Let’s say you want to be a writer. To be a writer means, to be someone who writes. This is the basic level: the only requirement is to write.

Now, let’s say you want to be a published writer. To be a published writer means, to be someone who writes, whose writing is accepted for publication by an editor, and his writing is then subsequently actually published and made available for sale to the public.

Now, let’s say you want to be a famous writer. To be a famous writer means, to be a published writer whose works sell in vast quantities and are, therefore, well-beloved by the reading public.

Now, let’s say you want to be an acclaimed writer. To be an acclaimed writer means, to be a published writer whose works are admired by a critical and scholarly (if not academic) elite.

The difference between being a published writer and a famous writer in this context, is only one of degree: the works of the famous writer sell more copies than the works of his not-so-famous colleagues. Therefore, for the purpose of this blog post, we can lump together the published writer and the famous writer.

This leaves us with three kinds of writer:

1. The writer (with no further clarifications)
2. The published/famous writer
3. The acclaimed writer

If you just want to be a writer (with no further clarifications) then all you need to do is write. You don’t need anyone else’s approval. You don’t need to study with any teacher of writing. You don’t need to publish what you write. You don’t need to satisfy any requirements of any editor, publisher, literary critic, or reader.

Just write.

I believe that most writers begin their apprenticeship or their practice of being a writer in this way. We tell ourselves stories. We write down our stories. And in doing so, we seek to satisfy no one but ourselves – at least at first.

Many writers will not end up being completely satisfied with this state of affairs. In the end, they will want their stories to be read by others – and they will want their readers to enjoy reading these stories. This usually means publication, with the ultimate goal of being rich and famous as a writer. Perhaps I ought to say ‘rich or famous’ – some would-be writers dream more of fame while others dream more of riches.

Either way, in order to be a rich writer or a famous/acclaimed writer, the writer needs first to be published.

Now everything changes for him. Now, truly, he will need to study other writers, he will need to police editors, he will need to satisfy the requirements of literary critics, and he will need to appeal to readers in general. In order for this to happen, he will first need to be published – and this means writing a work that some editor finds worthy of publication.

Two avenues diverge here: the first leads to acclamation, and the second leads to money. The difference lies in the whole approach of writing.

In today’s market I would say – at least from my small experience of it – that the kind of writing that wins critical acclaim is not, strictly speaking, talesmanship. I mean by that that the story is not what’s important, but rather it’s word selection and felicity and ingenuity of phrase. The line is what counts, not the work as a whole. At best, to work as a whole is examined as an exercise in style or as a psychological profile of a character or as a mood piece.

The best teachers that I have found for teaching writers how to write to be published, and therefore to be published writers (not acclaimed writers, mind you, but ‘professional, journeyman’ writers), are literary agents. The how-to books on writing that have been put out by literary agents manifest an awareness of the art of writing, the craft of writing, and also the desires of the literary marketplace and his editors and publishers understand them. These books by literary agents strike an excellent balance between the needs of the writer and the demands of the publisher. The balance is a fitting one, since the agent’s role is to go between writers and publishers.

Most writing courses in academic institutions will teach you (or will attempt to teach you) how to write for critics, with the goal of being an acclaimed writer. Therefore, if your goal is to be a published writer and perhaps even a famous writer, I advise you to avoid all such courses of study. Instead, choose any literary genre that you enjoy reading yourself, and study intensively all the examples of the genre you can find – with emphasis on the best-selling ones. If possible, take a work that has sold well and that you particularly like, and copy it out by hand word for word – from beginning to end. Do this for at least a half dozen works, preferably by at least three different authors.

After this, what you must do is write, review what you have written with a critical eye – an eye towards what seems to be the preference of publishers – finish what you have written to the best of your present ability, and submit it. Reading trade publications such as Writer’s Digest will also help, although all the most important thing is this cycle: write, finish, submit – and repeat, over and over and over.

An entirely different path opens before you when you seek to be a writer, and not necessarily a published writer. Today, you can self publish to your heart’s content and distribute your work over the Internet free of charge.

This path requires no study from anyone at all. All you need to do is write and to satisfy yourself. This path will lead you down a road of your own idiosyncratic preferences and aesthetic tastes. The work that you will do may not fit anyone else’s idea of quality. It may not fit anyone else’s idea of a story. It may not fit anyone else’s idea of literature. It may, in fact, he looked upon as incomprehensible gibberish. Or, it might be hailed as genius. It might be deemed publishable. You might get offers to publish it by reputable houses (such things, though extremely rare, have happened) and you might even become rich and/or famous.

(I must stress, however, that this solo path is not to be undertaken with any sort of goal, dream, expectation, or even hope of being acclaimed, famous, or published in any traditional venue. Anyone with any serious or even slight intention of achieving those goals really ought to study one path or the other.)

These thoughts occurred to me and talking to an old friend who is looking to move from journalism and screenplay-writing into fiction. I was trying, ill-equipped as I am, to give him some advice as to what editors and publishers seem to like in today’s writing styles. And it occurred to me that his short stories, which seem both cathartic and self-revelatory, even autobiographical, might well be hurt and damaged if he distracts himself away from touching the raw nerves, real emotions, and poignant memories that are his subject matter, with any kind of consideration for literary critics and/or publishers put on their lists of what is required, preferred, and acceptable in writing today. Maybe, it occurred to me, my friend ought to seek the solo path and right for the sake of expression and healing rather than being acclaimed, rich, or famous.

(Composed by dictation Friday 19 September 2008)

Unmoving Pictures

In which he is forced to recant his earlier proposal.

In today’s paper, I read an article about music videos that were being posted to YouTube. These videos were created by fans and artists alike, and consisted of the song underneath a single still image of the performer, or perhaps a montage of images of the performer. The rap star ludacris was quoted as saying that the result allow the viewer to focus more on the music in a more pure form – all I could think of, was that it sounded like some kid in the 1970s staring at the album cover while listening to the song.

So, it seems that my brilliant invention has already been invented, and for many of the same reasons – the ease, quickness, and cheapness of producing it.

But in the meantime I have been forced to reconsider my position. It suddenly occurred to me that there are some moments in movies that have the greatest power of suspense, and many of these moments take place in near total silence, or with only a slight ambient track playing. In these moments, no one listening to the soundtrack alone would have any idea of what is going on – or, if we did have an idea, we would not experience 1/10 the amount of tension, fear, or involvement. In order to convey a what is going on and to achieve a similar rise in tension on the soundtrack would necessitate words – and would kill the effect of the visuals alone.

At the same time, there are actions and scenes that happen in a radio play that heighten tension and suspense precisely because we cannot see what is happening. A good example of this can be found if you compare the radio and film versions of the story Sorry, Wrong Number. Here in this story, a woman who claims to be an invalid and confined to her bed overhears a telephone conversation in which her husband arranges for a murderer to come to the house and kill her later that night. The movie version is an excellent example of classic film noir, and yet the radio version – precisely because we cannot see what is going on – forces us to imagine what might be happening outside the woman’s bedroom, where she herself can’t see anything.

These considerations lead me to conclude that I was wrong: any stand-alone radio play used as a soundtrack underneath images might be a great radio play, but not so great a movie. Or conversely, it might be a mediocre radio play and a very good movie.

My position right now is that anyone attempting this new form ought to plan out both versions from the beginning, and allow the versions to diverge wherever one approach would make a stronger movie and the other a stronger radio play.

This modification of the plan might invalidate the entire process, and basically turn my new form into nothing more than a radio play with illustrations – or, as my friend Tim called it, “a film strip.”

(Composed by dictation Thursday 18 September 2008)

I Talk It Types

An update on voice-recognition training

It's now been about three weeks since I started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking (version 9) voice-recognition software. Herewith an update.

For a blog post like this, the accuracy of the program is excellent: I would guess that it runs well over 90%. The other thing that I use the program for is to dictate handwritten drafts of old stories, so that I don't have to type them in, but I'll still get a digital copy. Since my writing involves strange words, archaic sentence structure and usage, the accuracy of the program is a good deal less with this material – I guess it runs about 75 to 80%.

I find that I have definitely changed the way I speak (at least when I dictate to the microphone) and as a result, my throat gets a little sore if I dictate too much in a day. I'm not sure if this is because I'm straining when I talk – trying to speak more clearly and enunciate more clearly than I ought to – or whether it's just that I'm not used to speaking so much, so long, without a break. I keep trying to remember to have some liquid nearby to take a sip now and then – every minute or so – so far I don't remember to do so, but I would advise anyone trying voice-recognition software that this is probably a good idea.

Another bit of advice for anyone who wants to try the program is this: use it every day. Use it for at least half an hour every day. At first, you'll find that it takes longer to do any given task with voice recognition (which includes time spent training and correcting mistakes) than it would to do the task your usual way. I expect it will take at least two weeks to gain proficiency sufficient that, using the program will be just as fast, if not faster, than doing it in your normal manner.

One problem with the software is that the manufacturers don't allow you any trial, to test the software and see if it really will work for you. I believe that the company Nuance which manufactures Dragon NaturallySpeaking has on their website an online demo, which you can play with to get some preliminary idea of how well the program might work for you. But I don't know how extensive the test would be for you – it certainly can't compare to using the real program on your own computer for half an hour each day for two weeks.

The program is also fairly expensive, so you really have to have a good reason to want to invest the money and the time to find out if it's good for you or not.

Here are some things that would make it more worthwhile for someone to use the program: first, anyone with repetitive strain injury or RSI and carpal tunnel disease would find that the voice-recognition software gives his hands and fingers a good break, and allows him to continue to be productive without further risk of injury. Second, there are other people who find typing difficult. When the winter comes, I keep my house so chilly that my fingers get quite cold when I'm typing for long periods. So I look forward this winter to being able to keep my hands tucked away, nice and snug and warm, while I dictate to the voice-recognition software, and it does the typing for me.

Today I boosted the amount of RAM in my computer, doubling it to 2 GB. I have been running into the problem where the voice-recognition software would tell me that it was running out of memory, so I hope that this is going to fix that. So far today, I have not yet noticed any appreciable boost in speed in the program. (For the record, I'm dictating to a Toshiba laptop running Windows XP with an Intel core duo CPU clocked at 1.6 GHz.) One thing I'm not sure about, is how raw clock speed in the CPU multicore chip helps the program work better. I believe the minimum requirements for version 9 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is the version I have, specify a 1 GHz CPU, and recommend 2.4 GHz clock speed. 1.6 GHz falls roughly halfway between 1 GHz and 2.4 GHz, but this is a mobile chip, so it might not be as powerful as the corresponding desktop chip. If we take the two cores and multiply 1.6 times two, we get 3.2 GHz, but I have no doubt that neither Windows XP nor Dragon NaturallySpeaking can 'see' both cores and use them to their maximum. I doubt the two cores running at 1.6 GHz do much better than 2.0 GHz – but I'm no expert in this.

As another one of my 'blind' experiments, I'm dictating this blog post without looking at the screen. I find that this works faster in speaking because I don't have to bother with checking to see if the program made any mistakes. On the other hand, whatever mistakes it's making, will be twice as troublesome to correct, because I'm going to have to go back over the entire blog post and reconstruct what I meant in the cases where the software atrociously misinterpreted my mumbles.

One other thing to consider is how fast I can compose while speaking aloud, compared to writing, whether that means writing out in longhand or typing on the keyboard. I'm not really used to telling tales out loud. Moreover, I find I have to put part of my attention into the simple act of speaking clearly, always with part of my mind considering how well program might be interpreting what I'm saying. This another difficulty also: that is that you have to be speaking out punctuation, which is different from the way we just talk normally. I have to speak out loud and name every punctuation mark, and that does throw my concentration off a little bit. I expect – or rather at least I hope – that in time I'll get used to this, and it will become second nature. (The program does feature a mode of operation under which the program will interpret punctuation and insert it based upon the way you speak, so that you don't have to name each punctuation mark. I expect it looks at rising inflection at the end of a sentence – or at least what the program interprets as a sentence – and then it interprets it as a question and answer sessions with you? A short pause would be marked with a comma, and a longer pause would be marked with a period. (I had to type out the words, 'comma' and 'period' – because I don't know how to force the program to spell out the words, rather than typing the punctuation marks.) Of course the program has to know something about grammar in order to make probable guesses as to the words you mean, so, analyzing grammar would give the program a better idea of what constitutes a full sentence.

I would say that using the program for normal tasks – especially business-related tasks – would be much simpler, smoother, and quicker transition than using the program to dictate fiction or detailed scientific treatises. I believe there are more expensive special editions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking geared towards medical or legal professionals which contain prepackaged vocabulary lists geared to those professions.

(Composed by dictation Tuesday 17 September 2008)

And He Shall Bear No Name

The danger of a protagonist who goes unnamed

Recently, a friend of mine has been sending me some short story fragments of thinly veiled autobiographical sketches. In these fragments, he persists in refusing to name his central character.

This narrative strategy is an interesting, dangerous one. It becomes very interesting when identity is part of the subject matter or theme of the story. For example, Daphne du Maurier used this strategy to great effect in her novels Rebecca and The Scapegoat.In both these stories, the central character felt himself overshadowed by the spirit and personality of another character. By refusing to name the central character, du Maurier emphasizes this point: her central characters in these stories become ciphers, though in both cases the intention and effect is quite different.

I’m not sure what my friend’s intentions are in refusing to name his central character. But the strategy does get him into trouble sometimes, because the talesmanship it is at times unclear.

The first, and most basic difficulty this kind of strategy gets one into, is how to refer to the central character. ‘He’ or ‘she’ can refer to anyone in the story of that sex. When you have two or more men in a scene, and you say ‘he went to the bar,’ who is ‘he’? Is he him, or is he him? The pronoun ‘he’ refers to the last-named male character. But, unless the writer is very careful, he can trip himself up when he forgets who that last-named character is.

When the writer commits this mistake, it’s one of the most basic mistakes he talesmen can make. You never want to confuse your audience – not without a damn good reason. (And even a damn good reason is usually not enough.)

The name of a character is something like a tool in your work kit. If you don’t name a character, you are eschewing that tool. The result is something like a carpenter who decides ‘Today, I’m not going to use my hammer.’ Now, whenever the carpenter has a nail, what’s he going to use to drive it into the piece of wood? Should he pick up a ranch and try to use that? Or should he do without nails, and use a drill, a wood screw, and a screwdriver instead? All the time, that’s nice, most useful hammer is sitting in the work box grinning at him, taunting him, unavailable to him, all because he made the arbitrary decision that today he wasn’t going to use it.

The usual (and most-often used) strategy the talesmen use when they don’t want to name their central character is to tell the story using the first person point of view. That’s what Daphne du Maurier used in both Rebecca and The Scapegoat. The first-person pronoun is just as good as a name: each serves as a unique identifier for the character. But when the talesmen decides to change the first-person pronoun into the third-person, it’s not so simple as simply replacing every ‘I’ with a ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ or ‘her.’ Sometimes, the structure of the phrase has to be changed. Oftentimes, a couple of sentences have to be tinkered with, because the pronoun ‘I’ can’t refer back to the last-named character of the same sex, but can only refer to the narrator of the story. The pronoun ‘he’ on the other hand, does and will refer back to the last named male character.

In one of my stories, I tinkered with it for years, and at one point I decided that I wanted to tell the tale through the eyes of a minor character. So I went through the whole story and replace the third-person pronoun for this character with the first-person pronoun. This was very easy, and it never required me to change any other part of the sentence. In addition, the first-person pronoun has a strange and unsettling effect on the audience, rather like the direct address in the cinema or onstage which breaks the plane, the illusionary fourth wall of the theater. Suddenly the audience finds itself no longer safe as the voyeurs of the drama – now one of the actors looks at them, sees them, and addresses them directly. We are now part of the story, we are now, as it were, on the stage ourselves.

I rather liked the feeling that this change gave to the story, but after awhile I changed my mind again, and returned her to third-person. But now, changing back was not so easy. Now indeed, I had to look at the sentence structure and decide whether ‘she’ would work, and would make sense, and would be, above all, clear to my readers. I had to change a lot of sentences because of this.

My experience is probably the reason why I’m so sensitive to this issue, and why my friend’s slips stood out so strikingly to me.

Alfred Hitchcock was once quoted as saying, ‘The audience always has to know where they are in the story – even when they are wrong.’ This perfectly sums up the situation. The basic and first obligation of the talesmen is to be clear to the audience. Talesmanship is a subset of communication, and the rhetorical arts. The talesmen is always permitted to lie to us in the audience, and to deceive them – but even when he attempts this, he has to trick us in such a way that we think we know what’s going on, even though we have been deceived. Later on, when we find out how we’ve been tricked, we usually don’t like it, and only a great delight will make up for having been tricked and fooled.

So these are the lessons:

1. Always name your central characters
2. When you don’t name your central character, use the first-person point of view

Failing to follow these two simple rules will necessitate great care in telling your tale – maybe more care than it’s worth.

(Composed by dictation Tuesday 16 September 2008)

Soldiers and Warriors

The dangers of a small volunteer army

I must confess to knowing nothing of what I speak today. I have never killed a man, nor donned a uniform, nor endured basic training. I have never taken orders, given orders, served in combat. I have never looted a conquered city, raped its women, burned its palaces. I have never been wounded in battle, nor crippled, nor killed. I have never won a medal, nor ordered men to march into certain death, nor been splattered by a friend’s brains.

Therefore, you may well ask, why do I dare to even broach this topic?

I dare because it is of the greatest importance. To the freedom and liberty of the citizens of a great nation, and the safety of its neighbors and the world.

Everything I have learned, or dared to learn, of combat and soldiering, has come to me through the tales I have read and heard and watched enacted. And it struck me that there is a deep difference between war stories told by men who have gone to war, and those told by men who have not; there is a difference between wars ordered and commanded by men who have not served, and those commanded by men who have served; there is a difference between the attitude of the populace towards its military whether that populace is made up of men who have served, or men who never served.

There is also a difference between the warrior and the soldier.

The warrior has existed since the first conquest. We can liken him to the chimpanzees, the young males who have no females to mount, who dare not fight tooth and nail against the dominant male, and who roam in small punk-bands about the edges of the clan’s territory. The warrior lives for plunder and loot. When he gets it, he calls himself a prince and gets to play dominant male himself, and mount all the females he fancies.

Most sports and athletic games are trials for youths, training to be warriors. In societies where warriors are allowed, they are honored, and boys dream of one day being warriors themselves.

The soldier acts out of duty (or orders) to defend his city’s interests, or advance them. His dream is not to be a soldier, but to be something else – or he takes to soldiering as another man takes to tinkering or tailoring or wood-cutting, as a trade.

In any society where most of the young men are put into the military, they become soldiers. In those societies where only a few of the young men enter the military, they become warriors.

Soldiers think of themselves as common men like any others.

Warriors think of themselves as an elite class, superior to the civilians for whom they feel disdain as weaklings unable to defend themselves, dependent upon the few, the proud, the warrior caste.

In the society where soldiering is the rule, most men out of the military have been in it, and they know it, inside and out. They know its foolishness, its bravado, its insanity, and its glory. They have no great love for the military and have no delusions as to the unsullied perfection of its soldiers; but they have a fondness for it, and some pity for the poor bastards at the bottom rungs of command. For the generals they feel only contempt – the same sarcastic contempt office workers feel for the top levels of management. Like management, generals take all the prizes, do none of the work, suffer none of the risks, and strut about spouting profane boasts in their own arcane lingo.

In the society where soldiering is rare, and hence only warriors fight, civilians know nothing of what goes on during the campaign; they only know what the generals tell them, and thus they believe all the generals’ lies. They worship their warriors, and think they are all moral, unimpeachable, just, right, fearless, unconquerable.

In every warfaring community (by this I mean the community of the military, whether of soldiers or of warriors) all newcomers must undergo a process of hazing. This is something known to fraternal orders of all kinds, at least in masculine society – I will not hazard a guess as to the initiatory procedures among the female societies. Among warrior castes, the hazing tends to be more informal and individual; among soldiers in armies, the hazing is professional, universal, and operates under formal strictures: it is known as basic training or boot camp.

An army of warriors is a collection of individuals, each striving for individual prizes of glory and loot. An army of soldiers is a mass, and must be soldered together into a mass. Basic training is the process whereby the individual citizens are made into that mass.

When the general gives an order to send 500 men into certain death, at issue is the success or failure of the campaign, perhaps the war and the polis itself. Whether any one soldier lives or dies is immaterial – perhaps not entirely immaterial, for the loss of each soldier lessens the total force the army has at its disposal for the next assault or defense – but what matters is the success of the campaign, the assault, the defense. If one out of every three soldiers dies, if the losses must mount so high to reach the hoped-for results of the generals’ plans, then so be it. The price must be paid.

Of course, this is not the outlook of the soldier who will be so immolated. He naturally would rather live. He will live, he will desert, he will flee, rather than get blown to bits.

Only the esprit de corps, the madness of the soldering that basic training has accomplished, will keep him a unit of his command, and not an individual man. Thus it is that the process of basic training is to destroy each recruit’s soul, break him, and remake and rebuild him as the brainwashed soldier, who will obey the order to cast himself into the fire, and who will do anything to preserve the integrity of his platoon.

It is a hallmark of a republic that it musters its armies from its citizens, as soldiers, who take up arms to defend their city, and put them down again when peace is won. It is a hallmark of an empire that it musters its armies from the few, attracting them with promises of loot and glory, exalts them to a false feeling of superiority, and wields these warriors for conquest – the conquest of faroff cities, neighbor cities, and even their fellow-citizens.

When a republic trades in its soldiers for warriors, it cannot stand as a republic for long. It will turn empire, with all the folly and ugliness that term brings.

And we will cheer our warriors, and imagine they are pure, and stalwart; and we will honor our generals, and imagine they know what they are talking about; and we will support our princes when they tell us conquest is defending the homeland.

And we will deserve it richly, when in due course of time, our warriors take up arms against our princes, and put the generals upon thrones, and take their loot from our own treasuries, and rape our sisters and daughters and wives.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, September 15, 2008)

Animatics

How animated films are built

A while back, in the post ‘A Question for Tim,’ I wondered about a new (if it was new) form of film, one in which you build up a soundtrack like a radioplay, then add visuals to this – visuals like stills, or graphics, short animation, anything you can do cheaply and simply.

Tim answered my question by saying this is the way it is usually done in cartoons: the soundtrack is built up not in final form, but pretty close; then the animators match their cels to the soundtrack, adjusting the soundtrack as needed.

The term for this process, he says, is animatics.

He doesn’t know for sure of any live action films that use the technique, though one director (who used to be an animator) is said to use it, at least in part, in his live action films.

So there you have it.

This isn’t exactly what I had in mind, though.

And Tim didn’t like the notion that the soundtrack could be sufficient unto itself. Truly, this is frowned upon in film criticism: rightly so, no one element should be sufficient unto itself, and each should be necessary for the whole. My goal, though, is to have two tales: one the soundtrack, and the other the film with sound and picture, which would enhance and elaborate the soundtrack.

The only example I know about is one that was never intended to be: on the DVD to The Magnificent Ambersons there is a recreation of the ending, whose picture has been lost, but the soundtrack to which has survived. You can hear the dialogue with productions stills. It’s the best they could do, but it isn’t what anyone would do who had the method in mind during production.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, September 14, 2008)

Revolution

Questions on where we go from here

We in the world are facing our greatest challenge ever. Over the next 50 years we will face what Europe faced when Rome fell, and what China faced when the Empires fell – only we will face it all over the globe, and we will face climate change which will feel like the rug pulled out from under our feet. Many of us will die; I’ve seen estimates that world population over this century will shrink from the present 6.5 billion to 1 billion. But maybe ‘only’ three billion people will die…

At the same time, we face a leadership (on just about every level in the United States, and on many levels throughout the world) that is stubbornly refusing to admit that anything needs to change. These are the men who won and wield power under the current state of affairs; they have everything to lose, and it is in their interest to convince themselves, and all the rest of us if we are fools enough to listen to them, that all we need is more of the same actions, behavior, and attitudes that got us into this bind. Yeah, that’s the ticket, all right.

What we need, then, is a revolution.

But when things are this bad, and the people are facing a leadership this powerful, this obstinate, and this ruthless, any challenge to the status quo will be met with guns and brutal repression.

Here’s a question to ponder: Why do revolutionaries think they have to kill anybody?

What’s the purpose of violent revolution?

I suppose that the thinking is that no peaceful change is possible, and since the authorities mean to hold onto power by force, only by force may they be toppled.

But when a violent revolution succeeds, it only places in power a new régime that is based on violence, and therefore only really understands violence. This new régime will therefore maintain itself through violence, and that means it will only be put down, in the event it proves mistaken or corrupt, by more violence … and so it goes, round and round.

Why can’t a revolution refrain from being a revolution at all?

Why can’t a revolution be a movement?

If you intend to build, you can’t start by destroying, however tempting you might find it. Whenever you start out by destroying, you blaze a trail of further destruction, and construction (which is what we really need now) is only that much harder to achieve.

My advice to anybody seriously concerned about the coming catastrophe – as we all ought to be – is to turn your back on your obstinate leaders standing four-square in the way. Just start building your own society, the society as you understand it ought to work now, and through the collapse, and after the collapse.

We need to build a sustainable society in a sustainable world.

If we can manage it, it will be the first time we will have done so – ever.

Forget the ‘noble savage’ mythology.

Think of the future.

Do whatever you can – whatever the obstinate, gun-toting leaders don’t absolutely stop you from doing – do it now with your family, your friends, your neighbors. Study and learn all that you can. Publish what you know and have learned, disseminate it freely and as widely as you can, trade and share with all the others.

We will be small, lonely groups in the great darkness, at first.

This is not a failing, it is the basis of understanding.

Nobody knows what we should do, what is the truly sustainable society. Not yet.

If a million efforts bloom, most will be wrong, all the way. Many will get only a little part of the answer. Others will get a large part of the answer. If we are very lucky, maybe one effort out of the million will understand it all.

Share what you know, and listen to the others with an open heart.

We can all trade up toward that full understanding.

If your leaders block you, think always of being like water against stone. Give way, yield, don’t fight back. Be humble. Be the bending willow, and not the stiff, breaking oak. Leave it to your leaders to be stone and oak. Be you water or willow.

Do whatever you can, be it ever so little. Do whatever is allowed for you to do. Break no laws. Help others who seek the answer. Join in league with them. Raise up the banner.

The violent revolution is the typhoon sweeping over the coast. It smashes, it wrecks, it floods – it passes.

The peaceful, determined movement is the flood rising with the groundwater. It surrounds, envelopes, drowns, engulfs, swallows, devours, rots. It takes its time but there is nothing that can resist it.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, September 13, 2008)

Defective Tales, Nightmares, and Dreams

Looking at Gilda as an example of a lousy tale that is a great tale

I was thinking about the Rita Hayworth movie Gilda this morning. This is one of the great films noir of the 1940s. The movie takes place in Argentina or some other South American country. Glenn Ford plays a down on his luck adventurer who is rescued by a mysterious nightclub owner. The nightclub owner is played by George Macready in a cold, sinister fashion. He has three things he values in his life:

1. His nightclub
2. His new bride (Gilda, played by Rita Hayworth)
3. His plans to corner the market in some metal (I think it might have been tungsten)

Glenn Ford’s character is taken in by the nightclub owner as his assistant, in charge of the club and also in charge of Gilda, who takes a lot of looking after. It’s clear as soon as we see Gilda and the adventurer meet up, that they have met before – even though they deny it to the nightclub owner.

Gilda proceeds to drive the adventurer half crazy trying to keep up with her. She makes a show of taking up with every man who asks her, and Glenn Ford’s adventurer he sure she’s fucking every one of them (although we in the audience are not too sure – we never see any evidence of it, and most audience members feel that Gilda is only putting on an act for the adventurer’s sake).

The story then proceeds along two tracks: first the love triangle, and the jealousy dance; second, the mystery of what the nightclub owner is really up to with his connections to former Nazis and the Consortium that seeks to corner the market on tungsten.

Glenn Ford’s character narrates the story in voice over. The voiceover is the only thing that preserves even the semblance of sanity or rationality in the storyline. The voiceover is overwhelmed by the visuals – the crisp, beautiful black-and-white cinematography and the musical set pieces as Gilda sings and dances and practically performs a striptease in the nightclub just to madden Glenn Ford even more.

These set pieces are what the movie is all about. Your impression of the movie a day or so after you’ve seen it consists solely of these set pieces. They linked together like the scenes in a nightmare or some erotic dream. There is a sense and a rationality somewhere about the movie, but even if you consider the voiceover, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

What makes this work, and makes Gilda a great film (or at least an unforgettable one) is that the cinematography and the music and the chemistry between the stars is so powerful. Basically, what makes it work is that the audiovisual aspects of film provide us in the audience with enough entertainment and enjoyment that the storyline, which is held in the weaker, subordinate verbal aspect of the film, isn’t even important.

A movie consists of these two elements: the emotional and poetical photography and music (or sounds) and the verbal. This is the only thing that makes a movie like Gilda possible. It allows the movie to entertain us while at the same time defying all rational explanations and analysis.

I’m not sure that this would be possible in a story that exists as text only. It would be possible in a play (which isn’t that different from a movie) or a radio play (which lacks the visual aspects of plays and movies, but has the audio aspects as well as the performance of the actors).

I think the closest the text only tale can come to this sort of defective talesmanship is in a narrative poem. The narrative poem tells us a story, but it can also include elements of lyrical poetry and it can be sung with a beat or a rhythm. Think, if you will, of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic: this poem tells a story (several of them in fact) with a strong beat and a rigid, inflexible rhyme scheme. Even reading the Kalevala silently, you can’t help but get caught up in the rhythm and fall into a kind of trance – the kind of trance that destroys your sense of time like a good marching song. I’ve read that the Kalevala was chanted by two men while they sawed wooden logs – back and forth the saw would fly, and the men would sing out the staves back-and-forth likewise.

But this is a far cry from the seductive powers of the movie Gilda.

(Composed by dictation Friday 12 September 2008)

Notes for Readers and Talesmen Both

The pleasure of tales, and the promise and peril of Romance

I will try now a little experiment, using the voice-recognition software to compose this blog post off the top of my head – without any idea of what the hell I’m going to say.

As the reader follows the threads of a story, he probably grows more and more engaged in the characters and in their various desires, frustrations, and conflicts. Fiction offers us a way to live vicariously through the lives of imaginary characters. This creates the possibility of the spectrum of approaches from the more Romantic to the more Realistic. I tend to categorize readers into these two camps – those who prefer Romance and those who prefer Realism.

Realism, I think, depends largely upon details and close observation of character, nuance, and setting. It also asks of its readers that they also relish these very details, and know something about the material. The better we know both the setting and the kind of people who populate the story, the more we can appreciate how well or poorly the talesmen has drawn them. Realistic stories about faraway lands and strange, exotic characters can offer us innumerable details, but how can we tell whether these details are true or accurate? The closest we can come is to recognize certain aspects of psychology and domestic life that are similar to the ones that we know in our own daily lives. This creates its own pleasure – the pleasure of recognizing in aliens commonalities with our own people, our own family, and ourselves. It also allows us to view our own lives (and these characters who are so like ourselves) through new eyes and with new perspectives because we see them in strange dress with different-sounding names carrying on with slightly different customs at whose base we recognize universal traits and actions and behaviors of all mankind.

Romance, on the other hand, offers us a journey away from ourselves, and away from our own lives. There are two joys in Romance:

1. The joy of leaving ourselves.
2. And the joy of coming back.

The joy of leaving ourselves touches close on the joy of listening to all tales. Every tale, be it ever so Realistic, deals with someone else and someone else’s life. Even if the character lives in our own town on the next street, all the same he is not us. And the life he leads, and the situations he gets involved in, are not our own.

When the tale is, on the contrary, Romantic, the journey away from ourselves is all the greater and (for those of us who enjoy such things) all the more fun. We journey to exotic lands, we live alongside strange beings and we participate in bizarre customs. All our worries, cares, and anxieties are left behind. In exchange, we take up a new worries, cares, and anxieties – but these are all to some extent ‘safe.’ We know, after all, that it’s only a story. Even though all the characters may die, and evil prevail and good languish and perish, when the tale is done we will be safe and ourselves again (at least, as safe as we were when we began to hear the tale).

The joy of coming back, involves I think two things: the first is whatever sense of amusement, entertainment, and delight that we experienced when we heard the tale. All this we bring back with us, and it lightens our load in facing whatever troubles, toils, and gloom that plague our daily lives. (If, on the other hand, our lives are full of enjoyment and suffer no pain, we can nevertheless enjoy the refreshment of having taken a break into story land.)

The second joy of coming back derives from whatever wisdom we have gained in the process of hearing the tale. Not all tales of course have morals, or impart to us any wisdom at all. But every tale encloses like a shell encloses a nut – because every tale embodies and encapsulates its author’s wisdom. Every author has some wisdom. Every talesmen has something to tell us. Every human being has learned some lesson in life, both authors and audiences – but they are never the same lesson. Every person has something to teach us.

In an odd way, when the talesmen spins a yarn about strange lands and mysterious beings, he approaches in a roundabout way his deepest truths and most intimate wisdom. He will tell us things without realizing it. He will tell us things that he doesn’t know that he knows. The world of fantasy is connected in subterranean ways to the world of dreams. And the world of dreams is connected to her innermost desires, longings, needs, fears, and earliest experiences of life. Out of dreams emerges the wisdom of the body, that is always learning even as ‘we’ are learning, only in very different ways. All these lessons will be revealed as the talesmen tells a tale of complete and utter imagination, without the slightest connection to ‘real life’ and without himself realizing just what it is exactly that he’s doing.

In just the same way, we when we hear or read a tale of this kind, experience it as a kind of dream ourselves. The process of reading a fantasy tale creates a mirror to the process of writing one. The writer allows himself to ‘speak in tongues’ and from this babble emerges the language of his deepest heart. The reader then ‘dreams’ the tale when he reads it and this dream writes its own wisdom back on to his heart.

This process operates below the conscious level. That gives it enormous power – and creates great danger at the same time. Evil dreams, when we eat them off another’s plate, can write evil in our own souls. Therefore, be warned! Listen, and be warned!

(Composed by dictation Thursday 11 September 2008.)