Who Are We?

Different levels of identification determine our future success

This is the third in my series of blog posts sketching out a framework or underlying theory behind a mode of living and organizing that I think is better than what we have experienced in the past. (Our past experience does not seem sustainable, and it does not seem that it can last very much longer – therefore some kind of change will be necessary, and these posts are a starting block for us to consider a way forward out of this mess.) In the first post, we looked at social organization and what is most fitting for man. And the second post, we looked at the institution of property, and tried to see how we might consider property in different terms and of different kinds.

Now, let’s look at social organization from a more personal point of view.

Who do you think you are? Most of us have many answers to that question: we might consider ourselves to be an individual first, a member of a gender, a member of a family, a laborer of a certain profession, a member of a certain institution or enterprise, a member of a certain ethnic heritage, a member of a certain religion, a member of a community, state, region, nation. All of these different identities overlap and to some degree conflict with one another. We can sometimes find ourselves being pulled or torn between two or more of these identities, especially if the different groups with which we identify ourselves are themselves in conflict.

Some of us like to think of ourselves as members of a more abstract and more general group than those groups which we find immediately around us. We might consider ourselves to be ’citizens of the world’ and we might actually disdain or look down upon our neighbors or fellow townsfolk.

This will prove to be a grave and costly mistake in the world to come.

Once upon a time, men have no idea of any association broader than that small group among whom they themselves lived and worked and bred. A long time later, after the intervention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, men began to identify themselves with the land upon which they lived. They were born there, raised there, and would in time be buried there. Only a great crisis such as famine or war might break the bond holding them to the land where they lived.

I don’t want to claim that this was any kind of ’Golden Age’ by any means – in fact I’m quite sure I myself would find such a life both alien and depressing. But this way of life has one great benefit over the life most of the developed world has led during the 20th century: it is sustainable.

It is not entirely sustainable – or at least, it does not have to be sustainable, as we can see quite easily from all the cultures that perished in the past. So I guess I really mean that the feedback mechanism of sustainability works a lot faster under a more local economy that is bound and tied and dependent upon the natural resources of the immediate area.

Consider as a hypothetical model, a valley penned in between two mountain ranges. There is only so much fertile land on the bottom of the valley which can be farmed. There is only so much meltwater coming down off the mountain peaks each year. There are only so many minerals to be extracted from the mountain sides. Along one side of the valley there is a forest – and it will quickly be seen that the forest is growing bigger or smaller depending on how much wood is taken out of it, how many trees are cut down each year, and how many might be destroyed by fire. It can also be seen very easily that this forest is not infinite. (Nothing of course on this earth is infinite; sometimes the oceans and the air, the central forests of Europe and the grasslands of Eastern Europe a thousand years ago seemed to be infinite, or even were infinite to all intents and purposes, as far as one man’s mind could conceive of them. The chief advantage of a small valley such as the one we are considering here, is how its finiteness is so readily apparent and measurable.)

Now consider another hypothetical model, a small town surrounded by a few square kilometers of orchards and farmland. In this small town there are perhaps six to ten representatives of any given profession – a half dozen butchers, a half dozen bakers, five greengrocers, seven coopers, and so on. Any potential customer in this town will know all these butchers, bakers, greengrocers etc. by name and family connection (and all sorts of tidbits of local gossip). The average citizen of this town will have a pretty good idea of the relative quality of goods produced by any of these professionals as well as their personal honesty and integrity.

Against the model of the valley now, consider the model of the globe – the model the world’s economy has been laboring under for the past 20 years or so. The world is a mighty big place – too large, in fact, for any one of us to conceive of in our minds. It takes dedicated scientists with sophisticated instruments to be able to measure and judge the health of the world’s forests and oceans and atmosphere. And then they can tell us their conclusions, but these conclusions will be couched in numbers that are hard for us to grasp, so far do they run beyond our limited comprehension in their very vastness. (And that vastness by itself makes it easy for each one of us to justify doing something that will harm the environment. We know it’s not the right thing to do, but against the vastness of the resources involved in the whole globe, how much harm can one man’s small action do, anyway?)

Against the model of the small town now, consider the model of the global economy with all its immense multinational corporations. This is a model so characterized by alienation, that both the workers and the consumers of the goods produced by it must find themselves totally adrift, without any connection to one another. The worker is given no cause to think of the person who will actually be consuming the goods in question – much more likely, the worker will only be concerned with his immediate supervisor and coworkers. To the consumer, the product has at most a recognizable brand which the consumer associates with a company but not with any particular person who is actually touched the product by hand.

(Composed by dictation Thursday 16 October 2008)

Who Owns It?

A new look at property.

(This post represents a departure from the normal domain of this blog. Instead of talking about talesmanship, storytelling, and the arts, I examine a theory of ownership. Just as with my thoughts about talesmanship, however, the following represents some opinions and theories that I would like to share with the wider world.)

To begin with, let us say that there are two broad categories of property: first, private property, and second, public property.

Private property is anything personal that pertains to an individual, is more or less portable, and is impermanent. Examples of this might be clothing, a hair brush, a toothbrush, a book, a bed.

Public property is anything over which an individual has some measure of control, but which will in all likelihood helped lay of the individual, and whose usage and disposal will have an effect upon the community as a whole – and therefore the community has a certain vested interest in how this property is used and disposed of.

We can further divide public property into the following three categories:

1. Property that the individual develops
2. Property that the individual enhances
3. Property that the individual finds

The first of these, any public property that the individual develops, would not exist in its current form without the knowledge, efforts, skills and labor that the individual has put into it. An example here would be a house. Another example would be a field of corn, which the individual has plowed and sown and watered and tended to.

The second, any public property that the individual enhances, also would not exist in its current form without some labor from the individual. In this case however the individual’s labor is of much smaller import than the labor he has put into transforming the first category of public property. An example here might be a mine whose main value is the mineral deposits which the individual has found and made available for extraction.

The third, any public property that the individual finds, would exist pretty much in its current form whether the individual involved did anything or not – all he did was to find something. An example of this kind of property might be a lake or a river.

I make these three distinctions over public property in order to set forth three stages of private prerogative and control over property that, in its essence, was not created by the individual and therefore cannot be said to be entirely his – it is not, in other words, private property. The more the individual is required in both his labor and his skill to create the property as it exists in its current state, the more control the individual ought to have over that property’s use and disposal. To grow a crop is to make of seeds and earth and water something which may be eaten. In some sense, the farmer has ‘created’ the foodstuff. To extract an ore from the earth is not to create it, but rather to make it available to the individual and his fellow men. To find a river only makes available the knowledge of the existence of the river, without transforming or altering the character or attributes of the river.

There are in addition certain properties that no one discovers, enhances, or creates – these are the common properties of the earth itself, and do not properly belong to anyone. Rather, they must belong to everyone (and perhaps to all living inhabitants of the earth). Examples of this kind of property include the air, the seas, and the deep water in the earth.

We might go even farther and say that all crucial components of the global ecosystem belong to this final category of property, which belongs to all of us as a whole and to none of us as individuals. For if any crucial component of the ecosystem could be disposed of by any individual or group, then that individual or group holds the entire ecosystem hostage, and all our lives and future existence depend upon their goodwill.

I’ll have more to say in future posts on the implication of these theories.

(Composed by dictation Monday 13 October 2008)

Short Thoughts

Some short essays from youth and long ago

Art and Misery

If people’s lives are sad, why should they turn to art to find more grief? And if they are happy, why should they turn to art at all?

Art is the solace for misery. It has a long future, since it creates the misery it gives solace to.

‘Pornography tends to increase the very anxiety it solves.’ But so does all art.

‘Write What You Know’

One of the clichés that must be exploded: write about what you know. Never do that. Write about what you’d like to know. Without the mystery there is no excitement. Boredom is the antithesis of art.

Writing Burns the Filament

The imagination is the filament. Writing burns the filament. It was no accident that the light bulb was chosen as the symbol of invention.

Edison’s achievement was not the invention of the light bulb. Light bulbs had existed before. What Edison did was devise a filament that didn’t burn out in less than ten seconds.

A long-lasting filament is also the goal of all writers.

Writing and Concentration

Writing occupies all your concentration. It holds you; it burns you. It is not a pleasurable experience. No one undertakes it out of desire. Not for long. They burn out fastest of all.

You do it because you have to. It is a need more compelling than the pain of the fire. When you are fat and smug, snug and smiling, is not the time to write.

The need to go elsewhere, what is it but the need to escape?

No one runs to; he just runs from.

Hence the best conditioning of the artist prior to working, is to do something disgusting. Then you can escape yourself. You can endure the crucible, because to rise up out of it, back into yourself, would be worse.

Do something dirty, then escape it in art.

This is also known as psychological self-destruction.

But the man with no soul makes the greatest of artists. ### No Art Says Anything

(July 15, 1977)

No Art says anything.

But don’t we admire and esteem artists whose work does say something more than those whose work does not?

Reconciliation: yes we do, but that doesn’t alter the point – art is not a medium of anything but the Dream.

We eat food for nourishment. Food’s purpose is to provide the chemicals and energy we need to maintain existence. If the food tastes delicious and is well prepared, we enjoy it more; but if it fulfills the basic nourishment no better, then our added appreciation is directed to other things than that thing we eat for.

This is still a retreat from my earlier thoughts. Then I would have stated it: Art is entertainment and all else is superfluous. Now I would say: There are many things that we enjoy in art, but the basic raison d’être of art is entertainment. This is not so radical and for all I might talk, the basic reaction would be: so what?

I have redefined the reaction to art but not redirected it.

The great artist, then, would be one who did his art well. Therefore we have three categories:

1. The great artist. One who communicates the Dream well.
2. The great craftsman. One who controls words and their relationships (or the corresponding details in another art) so that they serve his will.
3. The great thinker. One who’s inside his superb in such matters as psychology, ethics, philosophy, etc.

It is clear that of these three, the first has hardly been acknowledged; the second is in disrepute (without being the third); the third is lauded above all else today.

But a thinker is not an artist.

All Art Is Fantasy

(July 15, 1977)

All art is fantasy. Art is the detailing of things that didn’t happen, people who didn’t exist, for a purpose. The aim in mind is important. Anyone can lie. If all art is a lie, then the criterion of quality is the effect. Artists with us are judged on how well they achieve an effect.

There is well-done writing; that is when the artist achieves a powerful effect. There is good writing; that is when we happen to enjoy the effect this artist is creating. Great writing is both good and well-done.

Never forget therefore, that when a critic says something is great, half of that judgment is simply: I like it.

No one enjoys what he doesn’t understand. If you don’t understand it, it isn’t great – for you.

‘Great’ is different from ‘important.’ Important is an objective judgment on the place of a work in the historical evolution of art or society.

Fantasy cannot be all art. Fantasy has a more limited meeting: Art about that which could not be. The phrase is in the impossible but it really means just the very improbable. Therefore for fantasy in the statement at the beginning, substitute: ‘the dream.’

Art revolves around the dream. The dream is central to all art.

Fantasy also has another meaning: to fantasize is to dream.

It would seem, then, that fantasy is the purest form of art.

Fantasy has an age-old formula: from the mundane to the exotic (and generally back). ‘There and Back Again’ is timid fantasy. Desperate fantasy is held within the words, ‘Him, Her, There.’

The other self. The other sex. The other world.

The captain. The Princess. The lost Empire.

But we can reverse this process. Take all genres that employ the formula. They are fantasy genres. Pornography for example is fantasy art. What else?

The Higher Form of Fantasy

What is the purer/higher form of fantasy – that in which the hero from here/now goes there; or that which takes place totally there?

There is also the fantasy in which we think the fantasist is suffering from a delusion, but then the world turns out to vindicate his dream.

Suspense

(July 11, 1977)

There are two kinds of suspense: that of form and that of substance. Formalistic suspense occurs when the author withholds a piece of important information; you read on to find out what that piece of data is; or it is an interruption – a chapter break or plot interpolation – at a high point of action; or it springs from skillful foreshadowing, although this last is a part of the first.

Substantive suspense occurs when there is an unresolved conflict. The tension of the conflict builds; the point of crisis seems falsely to be reached several times. This tension must be purged violently. There must be some physical action in the climax to dissipate it.

Time and Composition

(Another essay from his youth, composed on March 1, 1979)

Lin Carter, like HP Lovecraft and Rosemary Rogers, sleeps by day and rises at sunset to write. I wonder if there might not be a connection between the two?

It seems to me that I have difficulty writing during the months of March through May, so enraptured at by by the reawakening of the earth. It becomes a distraction: the sweet fragrances, the songs of mating birds, the warm benevolence of the sun, the branches greening and the eyes of flowers everywhere about. The best time to write during the day is for me in winter. December and January and February, when the earth is asleep. Then it seems to me that I can fall fully into myself; or is it that my self can blossom outwards? Howsoever it may be, it is at these times that my writing goes best.

I wonder if perhaps the type of writing has something to do with the best time to write. Then I would say that during the daylight hours we are reminded of the Reality of life, beside which the Artificiality of writing becomes most evident: so that I might say those who write of mundane things were best to do their writing in daylit hours. Yet those others of us who write from within of great passions or fantastical visions, should do our writing in the dark, when the land is hushed and lit only by Moon- and star- and fog-lights, and everything is perceived as Suggestions of what Might Have Been. Really, these things seem preposterous in the daytime – yet a passionate belief is needed, the more so to draw our readers into the web of our beliefs.

(Composed by pen, dictated on Wednesday, October 8, 2008)

Speaking in Tongues

Does a greater control over the vocal chords lead to greater mastery of talesmanship?

Over the past few weeks, I have been training (and been trained by) Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a voice recognition program. In the course of this process, I have probably talk out loud more than I have at any other comparable period in my life!

I wonder – where will this lead?

Possibly it will lead nowhere. And yet I can’t help but suspect that there is some greater connection between the act of speaking and a fluency with words themselves. I may of course be entirely wrong about this – it might be equally true that writing the words down, whether on a keyboard or longhand, is just as strong and instructive a pathway to the deeper art of finding words, summoning them up from memory, and using them in sequences that are both communicative and artistic.

And yet it cannot be denied that the language that we create when we speak will perforce differ from the language that we create when we silently sat down words on paper or screen. The language as it is spoken is the oldest form of language, saving only for the gesture – if we can really say a selection of gestures without any verbal language is a language at all.

I find, for example, that even as I dictate old essays from 30 years ago, I will sometimes change the phrasing because I’m sure that the voice recognition program will misinterpret what I say.

This is something that I realized quite some time ago, when I was studying foreign languages. We never really hear all the words that someone else is saying. Instead, we hear certain key words and then we assume that these keywords are being used in their standard, phrases – the phrases in which the words almost always occur – and we also tie in these few words that we hear to the context of the subject which we are discussing. This is what I concluded was the most difficult thing for anyone to get past when listening to the conversational speech of native speakers in a foreign language. They just speak too fast! It seems impossible to hear every discrete word – that’s why I came to the conclusion that normally we don’t hear every single word, but maybe one out of four or one out of three words. But since we know that usual phrases those words are found, and since the conversation follows normal guidelines, we can function quite adequately – if we are fully-conversant or fluent in the language.

When I was writing longhand, I always took pride in tweaking my grammar and my phrases, so that they would be a little bit unusual, a little bit distinctive. This is all well and good, when the words are there to be read, and they can’t be misunderstood, and every single word can be read, and the reader, if thrown off track for a moment, can always back up and reread a phrase or two.

But in speaking these same thoughts, it works to a disadvantage of communication to alter the typical patterns of speech and phrases and clichés. The voice-recognition software never fails to understand my speech so often as when I am trying to speak an unusual phrase or grammatical construction. Whenever I come upon such a phrase in these old writings of mine, I have to choose between two paths to achieve a near-perfect recognition on the part of the program.

The first path is to slow down. I have to speak each word separately and distinctly, and not as part of any phrase. This works very well when the words are polysyllabic and therefore have far fewer other words that sound even remotely similar. The second path is to rewrite as I dictate, and rephrase these unusual and distinctive phrases into more common and typical phrases, such as any other native speaker of my language would recognize immediately as the first choice of expression of the same idea. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is not, of course, as intelligence or flexible as another human being, therefore I have to be even more careful – it’s rather as if I were speaking to someone slightly hard of hearing, or someone who knows the language very well, but is not completely fluent in it.

This means that if I go on to compose directly into the voice-recognition software, I will probably (by a process of reinforcement) tend to compose phrases that are simpler and more common and expected that I would if I composed on a keyboard or by hand.

It also means that my relationship to language is now being shaped primarily (at least actively – i.e., in the process of composition) through my tongue and mouth and vocal chords.

(For example – if I just said the word, ‘cord’ the program would not recognize the word as, ‘chord’ – but if I say the phrase, ‘vocal chords’ the second spelling is what comes up first. And interestingly enough, if I say instead the phrase, ‘vocal cord’ the first spelling comes up first! Knowing this, I am being guided and ‘trained’ by the program to speak in terms of phrases more than individual words. And the phrases had damn well better be common phrases such as most people use – because those of the phrases that have been built into Dragon NaturallySpeaking by its creators.)

(Composed by dictation Tuesday, October 7, 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)

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)

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.)

Update on Voice Recognition Program

Today I’m going to give you an update on my progress with the voice recognition software – this is where I am now, and how it’s gone so far, and the lessons I’ve learned so far. I think it would be a good idea if I did this every week or so – that way I could compile a list of everything that I’ve realized as it happens before I forget any of it. I hope that I will be able to use this in the future, and that anybody reading this who is interested in voice recognition software will also be able to make use of it.

I’ve been thinking in particular about what I’m going to do if I get a new computer. It will be a Macintosh, and that means I have a choice: I can either run windows XP in virtualization, or I can buy MacSpeech (which is voice recognition for the Macintosh using a licensed version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, or at least its engine). Either way, I probably won’t be able to use my user profile that I spent all this time perfecting in this installation of the program. The standard version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking doesn’t allow you to export or import user profiles.

So, was that going to mean that I have to start all over again from scratch?

The answer is, probably not. What I realized in the couple of days since I had this revelation, is that half of the training is done on me, and not by me. I have definitely learned how to speak in a different way – the way that the program finds easier to parse and to recognize. Probably a lot of this involves the simple act of speaking more clearly, and not any special way of speaking to the microphone so that the program understands. Not being an especially sociable person, alas, and also not being too outgoing, I’ve never spoken clearly, loudly, or in any way easy to understand by listeners. Probably that means that the voice recognition software is going to have a harder time understanding what I say – harder than it would understanding most people.

Now, I think that in fact, I have been changing more than the program has been learning. Call it may be 60% to 40%, or even as high as 75% to 25% – but I imagine that 75% is an upper limit.

So that’s lesson number one: Time spent creating one user profile and minimally training the voice recognition software is not all wasted if you have to reinstall the program or moved to another machine and began a new profile. Much of that time you will be using training yourself, and that will give you a head start on any new installation or training program.

Another thing I noticed, is that when I tried to speak too clearly, I over enunciate – what I notice that I’m doing is placing special emphasis on the final consonants of some words, especially when one word ends in a consonant and the next work begins in a consonant, and I anticipate the program is going to have a hard time distinguishing between the sounds of the two consonants. Since I normally slur the end of my words, when I speak too clearly in this way, what happens is that the program thinks it should throw in another syllable there – or rather, that I have said an extra word.

So that’s lesson number two: when you originally train the program, it’s very important that you speak in your normal voice as you normally would speak. That’s what they tell you anyway – and it’s true: because when you train the program, you’re feeding the program certain sounds, phonemes as they call them. The program then expects you to speak in this same way when you go on and do actual dictation. If you speak more clearly when you train the program then you do normally, the program is going to expect you to speak just as clearly from then on. And by the same token, if you speak more clearly after you train program than you did when you trained it, the program is still going to expect you to speak just as clearly (or rather, just as unclearly) as you did when you trained the program in the first place.

Since I have changed the way I speak in light of my understanding of how the program was recognizing what I said, maybe it would be a good idea for me today to go on and train it again. It does gradually learn as you speak and dictate, whenever you correct it. He learns not only what you mean by a certain sound but also it adapts to your way of writing and speaking so that he can tell the difference between words that sound exactly the same, according to the context in which you speak them.

Here’s another way, a specific way of speaking that I know that I have to do so at the program has a better chance of understanding what I say. Since the program operates with a certain degree of what looks like artificial intelligence, context is very important. The program recognizes what you say not only as individual words strung together, but also as phrases. So it helps if you speak each sub phrase of every sentence as its own small group of words, with appropriate pauses to mark its beginning and its end.

There we have lesson number three: you must learn to speak in full phrases.

An interesting side note to all this is how where I am of good diction from other people. Today, for example, I watched the DVD version of the 1936 Bette Davis movie, Satan Met a Lady – this was the second version of Dashiell Hammett’s (I had to type out his name by hand – this is another lesson that you have to learn this program: some words and phrases that the program doesn’t know already just aren’t worth teaching it, and you save a lot of time just typing them in) The Maltese Falcon. It stars Bette Davis and Warren Williams. Williams had a diction that was amazing. It’s very clear that he had stage training and was an accomplished speaker on the stage. In fact, he rather overdid it – his performance was a little hammy.

(Composed by dictation Monday 8 September 2008.)

A Question for Tim

Is this a new form of film?

I have a friend who’s a genius. He’s one of the most brilliant men I know, and an expert animator and cartoonist. He is the original ‘naked rabbit’ at http://www.nakedrabbit.com. He also teaches film, and is an all-around underground genius. So, when I have a question about a new form of filmmaking, animation, or cartooning, I always ask him first.

Long ago, it occurred to me that filmmaking students could very cheaply make rough drafts of their films by building the soundtrack on a cassette tape, and then shooting still photographs of whatever scenes they wanted to do. They would then make slides out of the photographs and project those slides in synchronization with the soundtrack playing on the cassette. The sync wouldn’t be exact – it would be pretty rough as a matter of fact – but it would be serviceable and it would give the filmmaker and his colleagues a pretty good idea of how well the film would work if they made it into a full live-action film.

Tim has the urge to make a feature film on his own, something he’s been talking about for a long time, and he has tons of ideas for scripts. What he lacks is the money, the huge amounts necessary to make a feature length film.

Now, I’m thinking to myself, ‘What about marrying my old idea with Tim’s desire to make a feature?’ The idea is simple: first, write the script. Second, cast the roles. Third, perform the scenes. Fourth, choose edit your takes, and build up a rough draft of the film as a radio play. Smooth out the timing, edit and re-edit the takes, and add in and sound effects and music. What you have then is a radio play version of your movie.

This radio play version should stand on its own, so that all the necessary information is included within it, and the audience listening to it, will have the full range of emotional involvement and reaction.

The radio play version will also serve as a podcast or audio book.

The next step is to build up a visual soundtrack that will complement and enhance the audio track. You can make this out of several different kinds of parts. You can use still photographs, for example, as in my old idea of the rough draft of the student film. But you can go farther with those still photographs in this case, because using video editing software on your computer, you can animate those still photographs, the way Ken Burns does on his documentaries. You can create transitions between those stills, for example, fades dissolves or wipes. You can also use animation to complement the soundtrack. You can use graphics – charts, diagrams, and suchlike. You can shoot live footage on video and cut that in.

You end up with a kind of hybrid monstrosity, part radio, part film, part animation, part montage, part PowerPoint presentation. And you can create this with very limited equipment for very little money. Hopefully, if you do it right, you’ll end up with something that’s almost as gripping as a live-action film – a lot more gripping than many live-action films that are produced for many millions of dollars nowadays – and something that can hold the audience’s interest for an hour and a half or even longer.

Okay, Tim, here’s my question: is this a new form, and could it work?

(If Tim reads this blog post, I will, in a later post, put down what his answers are.)

(Composed by dictation on Sunday 7 September 2008)