Body and Soul

Is skin of a tale more important than the flesh and bones that lie beneath? Is the body of a tale more important than its soul?

Bardelys had been reading the book summing up Steve Ditko’s career as writer and artist in comics from the early 1950s into the new millennium, Strange and Stranger: the World of Steve Ditko. He found a strange turn in the artist’s career beginning in the 1970s. And it caused Bardelys to reflect on what was most important in comics and tales.

In one of Ditko’s rare interviews (one done by mail), the artist had mentioned his first independent works, most likely referring to ‘Mr A’ and ‘The Avenging World,’ both of which had been published in Wood’s prozine Witzend. Ditko had said that he believed that his luscious, finely-rendered tales and essays had probably distracted the readers from their essence, that is, what he was trying to communicate. In future, he indicated, he meant to cut back on the fine finish and detailed rendering, so that the meaning of the tales and essays would take its rightful, pre-eminent, place.

This interview was not quoted in Strange and Stranger, but author Blake Bell did mention Ditko’s fall from popularity in the 1980s, as new artists came on the scene who excelled in eye-popping details and surface rendering, even to the extent of creating ‘cluttered’ and ‘overworked’ compositions that might confuse the eye and leave the story hard to follow.

This was an odd parallel with one of Ditko’s most admired artists in the field, Mort Meskin. Meskin had vied with Jack Kirby for the title of King and Quickest in the Joe Simon and Jack Kirby shop where Ditko had worked in the early 1950s, at the dawn of his career. Meskin had gone on to sink in fame and popularity in comics, and did not partake of the superhero boom of the ‘Silver Age’ of the 1960s. He was reduced to minor tales in scare- and fantasy-anthologies at DC Comics, until he left comics entirely to finish his career as storyboard artist at ad agencies.

Meskin too had been a master at compositional storytelling, at pace and leading the reader’s eye gracefully and lucidly through the panels from page to page, and Ditko had even written a salute to Meskin in a small fanzine in the mid-1960s (1965, as Bardelys recalled, but he would have to look it up in Strange and Stranger to be sure about the date). It seemed as though Ditko and his master and on-the-job instructor were following parallel paths.

Ditko’s self-published independent work had, from those first tales of Mr A and the Avenging World first essays, been drawn in a style simpler than his commercial work. It was clear that the words were more important than the art, which was a strange position for an illustrator to be taking.

But then, the artists in comics have always been as much talesmen as draftsmen, and the ‘pictorial’ style of Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, and Burne Hogarth was not always to be admired as pure comics, even if their individual panels were to die for. In the world of comics, Milton Caniff had the pictorialists beat all hollow. At least that’s how Bardelys saw things, and he was probably right. He did have to admit, however, that he loved Raymond’s women, and Foster’s detailed recreations of history, and Hogarth’s intricately-patterned jungles, as much as anybody. But they were only illustrating the story, and not telling it, and there was all the world of difference between those two.

Ditko had always been an excellent talesman even if not the prettiest draftsman. Nobody would ever mistake a Ditko panel for something done by Alex Raymond. By the time Ditko hit 40, in 1967, he was both a master talesman and drawing knockout panels; this, many critics contend, was his high water mark.

But was it?

Ditko went on to produce many hundreds of pages in commercial comics for Charlton, DC, and Marvel, as well as other publishers. He never again drew with the same intensity or intricacy of detail either commercially or independently. His storytelling remained impeccable, but his pencils were closer to rough panel breakdowns than any other artist’s pencil work, and after a time, he refused to ink his pencils any more unless he did the whole job — writing, penciling, lettering, and inking. Sometimes he enjoyed a high quality inker to finish his breakdowns (either in the inker’s own style, à la Wood, or in a pseudo-Ditko style, the way P. Craig Russell worked). Sometimes he was given an inker who didn’t know what to do with the pencils as Ditko had left them; some established professionals of great standing refused outright to touch them.

But Bardelys was more concerned with the tales where Ditko did it all. Here it seemed that Ditko had made the conscious, deliberate choice to shift his rendering to a simpler level, not abstract, but almost diagrammatic. The panels told the story, excellently. There was never any confusion as to what was going on. But there was no passion, either. The artist did not seem to have his heart in his illustrations. Instead, he seemed to Bardelys to have turned all his focus to the words.

Comics fans (most of whom are, Bardelys reflected, young) preferred the elaborate renderings. Bardelys knew himself, from his own amateurish drawings, that when you couldn’t get a line right, the thing to do was to sketch in a half dozen approximate lines, and hope the reader would pick out in his own mind where the line ought to go. Or else, put in lots of rendering, feathering and spotting blacks, and (if you had color at your disposal) violent color shifts, with knockout ‘effects’ like speed lines, ‘Kirby dots,’ explosions with lines shooting out from a center.

In panels like this, the words didn’t matter so much. Instead, what became the rage was either to put in one word, in big letters like a shout or cry of pain — or else several panels of captions, representing the stream of consciousness ramblings of the point-of-view character. Experience was what they were aiming at, getting across the us readers the experience of being there, feeling pain, concentrating, or the like. The thoughts of the characters were rambling, an attempt to capture what we all think when the river of our false selves and automata control our deeds, to put us in the hero’s place.

Ditko’s heros also had thoughts in captions, but these were always rational: philosophizing, moralizing, or puzzle-solving. Ditko’s heros in his independent work had hardly any personality the way Bardelys thought of personality or character. They were almost robotic, caricatures of Spock-like Vulcans in the old Star Trek series. And yet there was something quite gripping and engaging in the Ditko tales, something hypnotic, something that would not let you go.

Bardelys could only think that it was the master storyteller at work. Even when he eschewed just about everything we all think makes a story involving, Ditko could grip you.

The soul, Bardelys concluded, was more important after all.

The flesh and the bones trumped the skin.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, August 7, 2008)

Compose and Decompose

Kinds of criticism, or, full steam ahead?

Bardelys rethought his playing of the Game of ‘What’s wrong with this opening?’

He did so because of a philosophy he had adopted as an experiment, ever since he had read what Lady Dunsany had written.

Lady Dunsany was the widow of the Irish poet and talesman Lord Dunsany. And she had written, after his death, that he had written all his tales, novels, and poetry with a quill pen, and never rewritten a word of it: all of it was first draft. He set down the first draft and (being a genius, you see) it was brilliant.

There was also Bardelys’ longstanding admiration for the pulp authors of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. They had pounded out their tales on unforgiving typewriters for a penny a word, or tuppence; top of the market slicks in the late 1940s paid no more than ten cents a word, as Bardelys recalled. Under the circumstances, these authors too set down their tales ‘good enough’ and mailed them off in the hope of getting a check in return.

There was a type of popular tale, told in pulps, in movies in their golden era, in radio plays, in television plays, in comics, that had a great appeal to Bardelys, for it was all the world had left of the great Romantic poetry that had taken Europe by storm with the ascendency of the bourgeoisie. Romance was middle-class, and Bardelys was nothing if not middle-class, and so he liked what the middle-class liked. (It went past that, of course, for the fanciful tales of the Hellenic world, and the ‘lying sagas’ of the late medieval Icelandic sagamen, were also Romance, and so was much of fable and folklore from Sindbad to Cinderella.)

What all those hackworks had in common was they were done for money, and consumed for entertainment, they were part of the ‘Little Tradition,’ and they were read, attended, listened to, watched, and thrown away by a public eager for next week’s delights. Under such circumstances, great things were made along with much junk, and they were fashioned with a good will, as well as could be done at the time and under the circumstances, and then let go.

Rewriting was unthinkable in these fields, unless a tale didn’t sell. In that case it was sent out to another publication, pitched to another studio or producer, recast in new dress, or junked. Rewriting was, in the broadest sense, done through next season’s tales. A standard sort of tale would be taken up and retold in new dress, most of all if it proved popular. No matter if it was another talesman’s tale or your own, when you were stuck for an idea, you’d grab the old chestnut, put some new twist on it, and type it up again.

But you wrote forward, and didn’t look back. There was no money in rewrites, unless, as Robert A. Heinlein noted, some editor with cash on hand was proposing the changes.

It was the poetical equivalent of daily journalism.

Style with both was of minor importance. Meat — and quickness — and ‘good enough’ — were all.

Bardelys had thought he would take up this attitude, so alien to him, as an experiment. He would dash out a tale, dress it up just so it was ‘good enough,’ and go on to the next one. From time to time he would stumble on a tale that rose above his usual dreck, and maybe even a pearl here or there; improvement he would make, not in rewriting one tale twenty times, but in the course of writing twenty tales one time each. The twentieth tale would be told better than the first, the fortieth better than the twentieth.

So you see, to Bardelys it was contrary to his experiment to look over those old openings and try to play and tease them apart.

This was more for criticism.

There were, Bardelys reckoned, two camps of criticism. One was constructive, and one was deconstructive. Call them composing and decomposing. There was nothing to call one ‘good’ and the other ‘bad.’ It lay more in their functions.

For example, a talesman looking over a tale he had not written, and seeing something he’d like to swipe: this was constructive, and composing. But if he only picked the tale apart to prove to himself that his stuff was better, that was deconstructive, and decomposing. It could still be valuable, as lessons in what he ought to avoid.

Again, a critic for the daily rags or blogs might read a tale, and tell others as potential fellows of the same audience, if the tale was strong or weak, whether it had moved him or not. This was constructive. Or a critic in academia might read a tale, and offer it up as an example of theory, and that would be deconstructive, in Bardelys’ view.

And so, with but two small steps, Bardelys abandoned what he had called only the day before the Great Game, and decided that for him, for now at any rate, there was only ‘Forward!’ — and no looking back.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, August 6, 2008)

A New Beginning 2

Another look at another opening: the Game is Afoot

Bardelys watched the clouds pass by. So dark, and so little rain had fallen! The musk melons were swelling, and the eggplants were dark and big, but (innocent that he was) he couldn’t tell if they were ripe or not. ‘Not yet, not yet,’ he said, ‘at least I don’t think they are ready as yet.’

Meanwhile the compost heap that he had freshened with new grass clippings, had come to life with the liquor-like, intoxicating aroma of the fungi; steam arose from it when he shifted it, and it was hot enough so that even on a summer afternoon he could feel the waves of it baking him.

He shook more clippings on the pile, and turned them with the sodden leaf-pads buried in the muck. It was not, he reflected, a textbook compost heap, and he didn’t know just what he should do to fix it, other than blending in more greens. Well, he would see, he would see about it. He didn’t look to use it before next spring anyway, a good nine months or so. It should decompose nicely enough in that time.

That left the decomposition of his own tales. He had enjoyed toying with the start to The Juniper Tree the day before, but he had, he thought, taken the wrong tack with it. He had looked at it with blank eyes (as blank as the talesman’s own eyes could be). This had led him to be more accepting, maybe, than he should have been.

Now he proposed turning it around… he would make a Game of it, and look at each opening of his with a simple question:

“What’s wrong with it?”

He would try to find fault, without needing to repair, for unconstructive criticism was the easiest thing in the world.

Today he took up the start of a recent tale, and one he had not done more than two drafts on: it was an adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory’s tale of the Knight of Two Swords or Balain.

This tale he had opened with the most blatant kind of Narrator that could be, in an Introduction of the Talesman. After that the tale itself began with a second Introduction.

So there was a pattern growing, for this was the second tale he had taken up, and both had had the sin of the Double Start.

That was troubling. It told Bardelys that he had trouble deciding and (if truth be told) he knew this was a fault of his, and moreover, he knew that in some ways it was a talesman’s primary job, to decide what to tell and what to leave out. That and the arrangement of the parts he kept in, would amount to what Bardelys reckoned must be 90% of the talesman’s job.

Be that as it may. Black mark #1. On to the second beginning, the beginning proper to the tale:

When Arthur, Uther Pendragon's son, drew the Sword out of the Stone, only a few barons and knights would follow him. Most defied him, and bade him prove his claims upon their lands by force. And for years England and the Isles were rent by war.

Two men did more than all the rest to win those wars for Arthur and secure his father's throne. One was Merlyn the Sorcerer, and he is famed throughout the world and will never be forgotten. The other was the Northumberland knight Balyn the Wild, who by strength of arms caused the death of twelve rebel kings upon a single day.

Balyn was never a knight of the Round Table. He fought and died before Arthur wedded Gueniver, before the mighty Gawain, Arthur's sister's-son, was knighted, and before Lancelot of the Lake became a man. And Balyn's name is all but unknown now.

And yet it ought not to be so, for Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.

Here is how it happened.

Following Malory, Bardelys had begun with a sort of summary of Balyn’s tale. Malory filled his tale with foreboding and constant reminders of Balyn’s unhappy end, never giving any reason why he should be so accurst. This, plus the endless round of battles, had impressed Bardelys so much that he had taken up the tale to adapt. He wanted to show some reason why Balyn should end as he had ended, and he wanted also to tie up some threads that Sir Thomas had left unlaced. These seemed to Bardelys to be implicit in the tale, and he had wondered how Sir Thomas’s source material had dealt with it, but he was unable to find the ‘Frenshe texte’ that told of this part of the cycle (it was in the Vulgate Cycle of romans either the original Vulgate Cycle or the second telling of it, and Bardelys did not like his chances of handling several hundred pages of medieval French).

So his opening had contrasted Balyn with Merlyn on the one hand, for Sir Thomas had stressed how important was Balyn’s help in winning the crown of England for Arthur, as important as Merlyn himself. And on the other hand he had contrasted Balyn with Gawain and Lancelot, who were the main hero-knights of the old tales. And yet Balyn was ‘unknown’ to most laymen today.

And finally, Bardelys had wished to contrast Balyn’s great contribution for evil as well as good. For it was Balyn who struck the ‘Dolorous Stroke’ and doomed the Fisher King, and Arthur’s Camelot, to ruin.

(Bardelys suspected that the monks who had composed the Vulgate Cycle big and small, had chosen Balyn as an example of a pagan knight, a knight unblessed by chivalry, wherefore his nickname ‘le Savage’ savage or wild. This also appealed to Bardelys, for it marked Balyn as even more of an outsider, and a man who fought, and only fought, often without understanding, and whose passion and headlong battling would doom himself and those he loved to great pain.)

So, ‘What is wrong with this opening?’ Bardelys played the game, and yet only with half a heart. The problem with this opening was that it was so logical and plain: that left little room about making it better. The exposition was handled in simple, straightforward manner, and was brief enough.

The only part that stood out in Bardelys’ mind was the last line:

Here is how it happened.

Could Bardelys drop this line altogether? He had hoped when he wrote it that this line would hurl the reader on to the next part (what Bardelys supposed must be called the third start of the tale). But maybe leaving it out would be stronger. Then it would (certainly) be briefer, and it would end on a sort of cliff with:

And yet it ought not to be so, for Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.

If this were left as the end, then the start of this line should be cleaned up. Maybe it would be stronger as two separate lines:

And yet it ought not to be so. For Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.

Maybe the answer was to work back earlier into the prior paragraph. The root of ‘And yet it ought not…’ lay in the prior paragraph, a way to tie them together. Bardelys looked back and took the two paragraphs together:

Balyn was never a knight of the Round Table. He fought and died before Arthur wedded Gueniver, before the mighty Gawain, Arthur's sister's-son, was knighted, and before Lancelot of the Lake became a man. And Balyn's name is all but unknown now.

And yet it ought not to be so, for Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.

What if he simplified that prior paragraph:

Balyn was never a knight of the Round Table. He fought and died before Arthur wedded Gueniver, and Balyn's name is almost unknown now.

And yet it ought not to be so. For Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.

Better on the whole, he thought, but still it could be stronger.

The problem here, he was all too well aware, lay in over-cooking the lines. The raw rush of enthusiasm lay in the first draft, and a man could only make that first try as good as he was a talesman. Obvious flaws could be fixed, those things that stood out to him as clear and wrong; but to take the ‘good enough’ and make it ‘great’ was another matter. One that may indeed lie beyond his prowess, until he had become a much better talesman.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, August 5, 2008)

A New Beginning

Looking at an opening, thinking about all openings

Bardelys found, contrary to all his expectations, but maybe not contrary to reason, that writing his blog through a fictional mask had rather than substituted for his urge to write tales, real tales, had increased it. It was like an appetizer: it tasted so good it whetted his appetite. He wanted more.

And yet at the same time he was wary. In the months since he had done any real tales, he had blogged extensively on talesmanship as though he were some kind of authority, a know-it-all. This was the farthest thing from the truth, the truth was he was only an amateur, and most likely a bad one at that. And yet, writing as if he were knowledgeable, he had come to feel as if that were true. If he now looked back on his work, he might find it was bad (it had happened before) and that he couldn’t see a way clear to improve it — which would prove that he hadn’t gained wisdom at all.

The Juniper Tree

Professor Tolkien had written, in On Fairy Tales, about the opening lines to the Grimm Brothers’ tale of The Juniper Tree, expressing some awe at its ancient feeling. Bardelys, in reading Tolkien’s essay, had also felt that shudder run up the back of his neck. The thing was old and nasty indeed, and he never forgot it.

In later days, he had taken up the tale and fashioned out of it and certain personal experiences of his own, a movie script. And only recently he had taken the script and recast it into a novella. Here is the opening as he found it now:

It was a long time ago. It must have been two thousand years ago, maybe even more. Back then nobody was sorry, nobody was mad. Everybody got along back then. Everybody was happy and everybody had everything they wanted, before I was born.

A couple lived on a cliff by the sea. Their house was known as White Quill on account of its color and they called the cliff the Beak. You couldn’t see the house from the road. The woods around the house closed it off from the rest of the world and you had to drive through the woods down a long winding driveway paved with gravel before you came out between the trees and saw the old house tall against the sky. Behind the house a green lawn led to the Beak. The Beak fell straight down to where the waves’ foamy mouths licked and gnawed the grimy stones. You know how greedy the sea can get.

On top of the Beak stood the Juniper Tree.

The Juniper Tree lived there before the man and his wife. It lived there before the house. The Juniper Tree grew up in the wind all bent up and twisted as though the tree was trying to look out the water and behind at the woods and back around at itself at the same time. The wind came off the sea and breathed into the branches of the Juniper Tree, and the branches whispered and muttered and talked it over with the wind, finding out what went on in the world beyond the Beak, behind the sea and past the woods that ran up and down the seashore ever since the ice melted and grumbled into the North a million years ago.

The first thing that stood out to Bardelys was the double opening. He thought this was a weakness: a tale should have one start and one end, and no more! And yet here he had wanted to establish the voice of the Boy, grown up years later, remembering what had Happened. The opening lines in the Boy’s voice also was the only way Bardelys had been able to squeeze in one of the most telling lines of the Grimm Brothers’ tale, the first line:

It was a long time ago, all of two thousand years or more.

Impossible to get the shudder of anxiety and fear that this line gives, in any other way. In the folk tale, the events were told as if they had indeed taken place ‘two thousand years’ ago, but when he had cast the tale into a script Bardelys had set it in modern times, so the notion of ‘two thousand years ago’ could only come in the way a young man would think, childishly, of his own first years, a metaphor to get across how long ago it seemed to him, and how much had changed about him and in him since then.

So the double opening must stay.

The second paragraph began the tale proper, and he found it a little to mannered. But it seems that in such tales as this, the atmosphere is vital. Strange and magical things are about to take place in the tale, and very quickly, and Bardelys had believed that the atmosphere of isolation and strangeness, the named house all alone on the edge of the sea, would be a first step into Eartherea for the audience. Maybe he was wrong, though. Maybe it would be enough to blunder right into weirdness awkwardly and directly, as if weirdness were not, after all, uncommon or unexpected.

The first character the Narrator gives is the Tree, a brooding presence, a witness to acts of depravity and bloodshed and horror. It partakes of the weirdness in the atmosphere, and so it’s most efficient, Bardelys thought, to bring it in first and foremost and in the middle of the atmosphere. The other choice would be to speak of the tree when it first plays a role, when the Little Witch goes out below it to make her blood-sacrifice in the fresh snow.

Bardelys noticed (did you?) the direct address to the audience in the second paragraph (the first of the tale proper). He had a theory about this, that the Narrator had to be introduced strong and openly at the very start. After that he felt he could back off and only bring back the Narrator when the need arose.

The Narrator comes in strong when he introduces himself directly as ‘I’ or implicitly when he addresses the audience as ‘you.’ The ‘you’ implies the ‘I.’

There was something else about the opening to The Juniper Tree. Bardelys had loved the movie by Terence Malick, Days of Heaven. He had loved the girl’s voice narrating the story. He had loved her awkward, gloomy, hopeless and toneless philosophy expressed in that voice. This voice was what Bardelys had taken as the model for the Boy’s Voice in narrating the tale. So the sentences ran on a bit, and expressed the same hopelessness, and showed that the Narrator was telling us what happened, without understanding it all himself.

But ‘down a long winding driveway paved with gravel’ should be shortened to ‘down a long gravel driveway’ or even ‘down a long stone drive.’ The ‘long winding driveway paved with gravel’ is a little too ornate for the Boy to say, although long, winding seems to do it, then paved with gravel comes as an afterthought, something the Boy forgot to mention right away. So maybe that was all right. But right now Bardelys thought ‘Down a long stone drive’ was better… no. ‘Down a long gravel driveway’ was best of these three. The ‘long stone drive’ was too efficient, too compact. It smelled of a tale told and retold and worn smooth in the retelling, and not the raw, fresh, wound that Bardelys wanted the Boy’s voice to get across to the reader.

All in all, Bardelys didn’t find much wrong with the start, and no way to make it much better. This meant that he had not, after all, gained wisdom.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, August 4, 2008)

The Siren of Easy Virtue

Sometimes great art inspires because it looks so simple

Bardelys hadn’t thought it out properly, when he had taken up the topic of the ‘Sirens of Art,’ and the reasons why we are inspired to try our hand at any art form ourselves.

Oh, he hadn’t recanted any of his previous notions. But there was an image haunting him, that would lead him to a new aspect of the whole process.

The image came in Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell. It was a reproduction of a panel from a 1950s comic story Ditko had drawn. The panel looked down on a man standing in a square of light amidst darkness. The light was canted, and the design was bold, striking, and simple.

After returning to him a few times, the image finally struck the proper note in Bardelys’ mind. The key to it was its simplicity.

Not all great art is simple, but not all great art is complex, either. There is a kind of great art that is simple, and a class of great artists who make their art simple, deceptively so.

Some of those old panels by Ditko look so easy to draw!

There were later panels from the early and mid 1960s, from Ditko’s run on Dr Strange. Nobody had ever created such a strange universe of dimensions and timescapes as Ditko had. Even in the 40-odd years since Ditko left the strip, none of the exceptionally-talented artists and illustrators who had tried their hand at the strip had captured it.

And yet the dimensions Ditko suggested were drawn with only a few squiggly lines, a rectangle, an oblong, sets of parallel lines. Simple. Any kid could trace them. But those talented artists had not been able to duplicate the magic in them.

It wasn’t, Bardelys now knew, the stylization alone that lured young would-be talesmen and artists and musicians to want to follow the masters in their fields. It was also the deceptive simplicity with which so many masters cloaked their art.

It was like the answer to a riddle or a puzzle. Once you know the answer, it seems so simple a child should be able to figure it out.

But humming a tune you have heard is not the same thing as composing that melody; copying a drawing is not the same thing as originating it; retelling a tale is not the same thing as inventing it.

It only seems as though it should be as easy.

And so the Siren of Easy Virtue had, Bardelys realized, captured the hearts of many of the young. Indeed, she might have lured more hearts than all the rest of her Sisters had managed to net.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, August 3, 2008)

Sirens of Art

Bardelys was charmed when he heard the following comment from an animator:

“Whenever I see one of the old Popeye cartoons, at least the black-and-white ones, it makes me want to draw something.”
— from the commentary track on Popeye Vol. I disk 3

This, to Bardelys, formed the heart of the artistic impulse. It lay behind every urge to create that he himself had ever felt, and he suspected it lay behind the urges of all artists the world over, since the dawn of art.

All good art, Bardelys deemed, involved a level of abstraction. It was not the perfection of recreation that made art good, it was the very opposite: the imperfection of recreation, when it served a consistent and striking aim, was what made art good, and great. And it was the consistent, purposeful imperfection that added up to ‘style.’ This style was a sort of lens, a way of seeing events or objects in the world, of hearing them, touching them, seeing them, imagining them in a new way. That was the gift of great art, and it could inspire, in those of us so inclined, to want to re-create this recreation, after the manner of the art we experienced at first, and then later in our own manner, which we must discover and lay bare, one fold at a time.

‘Ah, that’s good — I must do some of that myself!’ sums it up.

But then, Bardelys wondered, why did he (and others drawn to art like the animator on the commentary track) feel the urge to ‘do some of that’ themselves? And why did others (most men, he suspected) find themselves quite content to remain in the audience, and never have to create those experiences themselves?

Maybe it was all ego. Artists after all are famous for their swelled sense of self-importance. Maybe they reject being forced to swallow others’ creations, no matter how great, but must at last vomit out their own copies and reworkings, in order to say, ‘There! I made this, and it comes from me!’ Maybe the artistic impulse comes from a side of a man not unlike the side that rebels against omnipotent God, whose creation and intimate knowledge of all that is robs a man of his individuality, his free will, his potency.

Or maybe it lay in some small sense of dissatisfaction. Maybe there are some in every audience who feel the wonder and thrill of great and potent art so powerfully, so intimately, so thoroughly, that they become at length aware that their wonder and thrill are in some way lacking … that there might be, somewhere beyond, something more that would satisfy them 100% … probably this was an illusion, but it was worth striving for, trying to work one’s way closer, and a little closer still, to that perfect and complete satisfaction.

Or maybe it lay instead in a different kind of dissatisfaction — a dissatisfaction not in the art, but in life itself. Maybe we find in art so much joy that life begins to pale. Then we ‘need’ more art in a way almost physically addictive — psychically addictive, anyway. But there is only so much great art we can find. And there are only so many times we can re-enjoy the same old classics, before their thrill wears thin. Then we need more, more of the same only better, more like that only more-suited to our own desires and state, what we like and feel and believe right now.

For some artists and would-be artists, Bardelys was sure the goal was applause and approval by the audiences of the world. They wanted that piece of the spotlight that talesmen, painters, and actors claimed; they wanted the applause to be aimed at them; they wanted the love, the fortune, the fame that lives on. Bardelys suspected that this motive would be found most in the performing arts. In those arts of dance, acting, song and music, the audience could imagine themselves up there on the stage, the cynosure of all eyes. And it would be this fantasy, rather than anything to do with the creation of the art itself, that drew them.

But an animator works far from the crowd, and his principal role involves the drawing in the cell on his table; he forms his relationship not to the audience but rather it grows between his hand and his eye and the line he has drawn. A well-drawn line becomes its own joy, in a way that few can grasp. That line, there — how perfectly it represents, and goes beyond, the thing he wants to show!

In talesmanship, Bardelys feared, this lure was a fatal one, that was so strong and pure in graphic art. In talesmanship the love of the line, in and of itself, lay at the basis of the degradation and near-collapse of the tale in the modern world; it was the reason why so few critics even understood stories, and could only judge novels on the basis of a handful of sentences they found in them, with no idea of what made the story good or bad, or even a story at all.

But for himself, he did his best to see and hold in his mind the tale that lay beyond the lines. And he had begun to wonder, in the context of the animator’s remarks, whether the best tales were the purest, devoid of all ‘well-turned-out sentences’ and even the love of them.

Was Dashiell Hammett right after all, he wondered?

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, August 2, 2008)

The Hours

O, what a wasteful web we weave…

Bardelys thought of the musk melons, growing in secret virginal splendor beneath the viny leaves. So much for the good, he thought; but I do wish I might solve the journal software problem!

This, he realized, was a long-standing flaw with him. He did love toys, especially word- and text-processing tools. How often in the past had he found a new gem of an application or path, and spent his hours in rapt attention reading manuals and help files, translating his incomplete tales into the new file formats, prettying them up, playing and learning some of the capabilities of the new software … meanwhile the tales themselves got no closer to completion.

Lester del Rey had once said: ‘Some writers are interested in computers, and some like to write.’ The point was well taken in Bardelys’ own case, he ruefully acknowledged.

Ah well, he thought, shaking his head. What can I do? ‘I yam what I yam, and that’s all what I yam,’ as Popeye sagely remarked.

He had almost made up his mind now. He had almost solved the riddle. Almost.

Scrivener could contain the blog posts, although he was minded to give JreePad a good try. Both JreePad and Scrivener only contained organizing trees and nodes, and Bardelys wrote all the posts in a plain-text markup, then copied it, and transformed it in another application. So he could carry on with either application. Scrivener, though, could be set to capitalize sentences automatically, and do other neat tricks; it counted the words of each post; it contained spell checking; it was OSX-native, coded in Cocoa, and was aware of Bardelys’ system services. That gave Scrivener a powerful edge. He might compose in Scrivener (or OpenOffice.org equally) for these advantages, then copy the results into JreePad, but this introduced another level of complexity to the whole thing.

The mowing was best left alone, as a spreadsheet. Each part of the fields had its own column, and each row was a new day. He would then color in the background of the relevant cells of the fields he had mown on the days he had mown them. This gave an easy-to-read visual ‘map’ of how often he mowed which fields, and how many days had passed since he had last mowed any given field, and which field was likely to be needing mowing next.

That left the farm journal. And for this, Bardelys had today had a brainstorm.

Why not make something for the journal that was like the mowing journal?

It would be like a large calendar, with notes on each day. Only this calendar would be small, but expandable. On each cell of the table of this calendar (for he dreamt of an html file for greatest standardization) he would mark a word for a topic that applied: ‘Mow’ on days he mowed, ‘plant’ when he planted, ‘reap,’ ‘rain,’ ‘health’ when there was something to report on this front, and so on. The cell would only have a list of these words, but in a browser, when Bardelys hovered his cursor over any of these words, the ‘tooltip’ or ‘alt text’ would appear, with the relevant details: just what field he had mowed, what he had planted, reaped, how much rain, what pains or aches, and so on. This would allow the table to be small enough to glance over a month or more at a screen, but details would show up if he wanted them. He could in this way see when it had rained, when he had mowed, and so on, over a large period of time, easily. Each of the topic words could be written in a different color, or have a colored background, to make them stand out even better.

It was a nice dream. But Bardelys was not the html-coder for the job. He knew images could have alt tags, and he knew that links could have alt text as well. It seemed as though he might do the same in formatting text in OpenOffice.org, but the ‘title’ did not appear under the standard browsers Bardelys used.

Could it be, he wondered, that the thing might be done as a simple Open Document format text file? It was worth checking, he thought.

And so the hours fled, and danced in, and danced out, linking graceful arms, smiling in Botticelli gowns of summer. And no more work was done that day…

(Composed on keyboard Friday, August 1, 2008)