my word for the day (if I can limit myself)

LACONIC

Read its etymology recently?  Originally it refered to people from Lakonia, an area around Sparta, whose inhabitants were famously terse.  Better than terse.

The story goes that when Philip of Macedon threatened them, “If I enter Lakonia, I will raze Sparta to the ground,” the Spartans retorted simply: “If.”

I need to work on my laconic delivery.  Excuse me while I go practice.

On Gimmicks: just poorly disguised weaknesses or insulting cons and crutches?

I’ve been thinking about gimmicks recently.  Such an ugly word, “gimmick.”  It sounds sticky, gummy and like a cheap con.  Well, to me it does.

So what brings this on?  The book I read on Saturday.  I read it till past midnight because I wanted to know not so much what would happen next, but how it would end, period.  But although I read the entire book, and in one day, the reason I rushed through it was that I didn’t want to waste any more of my time reading it—it’s one thing to have done with it that same day, and another thing entirely to waste a second day on it.  I could have leisurely read it all weekend, but it didn’t provide that sort of pleasure.

So what makes a book gimmicky rather than simply “thusly structured or told?”  I guess it’s my sense that I can see the author’s crutches and on top of that weakness (of laziness), he’s also trying to con me or seduce me with cheap thrills.  How insulting.

Here’s examples from that particular book:

1. Sex that feels like a cheap ploy used because “sex sells.”  By contrast, the protagonist of Shadow of the Wind is a passionate teenager, and his sexual experiences are intrinsically bound to the story and it works.  In Fingersmith the sex is also a great part of the story.  It’s not simply writerly wanking, if you get my drift.  The protagonist of this story, by contrast, feels absolutely fake and a stand-in for the author, and the sex feels like stand-in sex for the author, too.  (Linked to gimmick #3, clearly.)
2. A protagonist’s unlikely brilliant ability to get out of any fight the winner.  Can we save that for TV?  (This is genre-related, but this book was not a ninja-tale.)
3. A sense I have, I can’t tell you why, that there’s some gratuitous self-revelation and self-love in a POV character who is meant in some way to reflect the author positively (example: as sexy, sharp, savvy, say-it-how-it-is and important)
4. Too many useful coincidences, not just stretching but making a joke of a reader’s suspension of belief.  In this book, every chief character is connected in some way to the NYPD, the mob and legal counsel.  (Including the film student working for minimum wage in a bookshop.)  Give me a break.

Maybe, though, if the writing was better (to me, as it’s a New York Times bestseller, something that’s utterly diminished my opinion of that particular accolade), I wouldn’t feel irritated and insulted by those crutches.  But was so obviously plastic.  It felt like a smarmy politician’s pick-up line.   

To feel clean again, I followed that book by reading another one entirely on Sunday.  This one I finished also after midnight, but because it was good and I wanted that closure of staying with the characters, in their mood, until the end.  This one’s also a bestseller, and once again I don’t understand how—but in this case that’s because I feel that it’s way too dense to be that popular.  Proof again that if a society VIP like the New York Times says “this is hot,” anything can sell, whether it’s trash or delicious but an acquired taste.

Anyway, this book did not have any obvious crutches to me.  It also was told through two POV characters, and two rather unusual ones, at that.  At first I felt the one character was too pat—a super intelligent 13 year old girl—but, hey, I accept it.  Because she’s also limited by her age’s didacticism, which is realistic to me, and surrounded by the concerns of her surroundings. 

The first book is The Book of Air and Shadows.  The second is The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

What about you guys—do you resent “gimmicks” or do you consider them simply poorly disguised story skeletons or something else?  And when you read gimmicky books, do you find yourself returning to your own work to eradicate anything smelling like gimmickiness in it, too?  Or do you want to convince me that I’m being petty?

I, for one, feel as if I’d hired someone to build me the Sistine Chapel, and they’d brought me to a plaster-and-chewing-gum-conjoined structure and expected praise.  Is that what I paid for?  Is that what he considers a Sistine Chapel?  No, it’s an insult and it’s an act of self-hoodwinking as well.  Or maybe just an indication of the author’s cheaper taste. 

  Ahem.  And now I’m going to get off my high horse and go to work.

Ich not bin Berliner, but…

Is it true–can it be true?–that above the Berlin Royal Library, a sign reads:

Nutrimentum Spiritus?

(ie Food for the Soul)

If so.. what delight

Paper Art

So I have reached the conclusion: sometimes it’s okay to cut a book up.  But basically only if you’re Su Blackwell.  When she does it, fiction comes to life in a most magical, delicate way.  (And the image she brings to life is made of the very pages describing it in the book.  So cool!)

Not sure if you agree?  Check these out and get back to me. 

The Old House 2007, by Su Blackwell

The Girl in the Wood, by Su Blackwell

The Girl in the Wood (detail), by Su Blackwell

Alice: Through the Looking Glass 2007, by Su Blackwell

Alice: A Mad Tea Party 2006, by Su Blackwell

While You Were Sleeping II, by Su Blackwell (I think)

     

This morning I imagined being broke.

It wasn’t a great stretch.  I mean, I’ve done broke before.  Plus each piece of furniture has necessitated a broke period; in many ways I’ve been lurching from one paycheck to another ever since coming back from Peace Corps.

But I’ve been thinking some more about Dao Hai Phong, my fave artist.  Thinking about him led to looking for his paintings online.  Looking for his paintings online led to falling in love with new paintings of his online.  And falling in love with his new paintings led to my trying to distract myself by looking at other artists’ work.  And that resulted in finding two new artists to love.  Which of course led to my mental calculus of how much I make per month, and how I could save to buy a piece of art.  Which led to me imagining being broke.  Again.

It also led to me imagining the art in my apartment.

None of this led to my cleaning the apartment, though.

Open Book. Read First Line. Screech to a Halt.

Remember how I met the geographer the other week, and she lent me a book she warned me might be above me?  The book is Geographic Information Systems and Science.

Well, I started it.  I want to quote the first line.  Ahem.

Almost everything that happens, happens somewhere.

Egad!  Who knew a book about the physical sciences would start off with the metaphysical!   I was awe-struck.  Put the book down a second in shock, then returned with eager anticipation.  But alas! alack!–Such a thought-provoking contention to start off the book, and then nothing following up on it–it was as if the authors considered the statement too obvious to bother with any further.

Almost everything happens somewhere.  So…where do the other things happen?  Doesn’t everything that happens, that is, have a place it happens or is? 

I mean, even if it happens in one’s mind, it happens in there, right? 

Well, I thought hard and decided that maybe something like Lord of the Rings or Alice in Wonderland–these tales outline things that happen somewhere we can’t connect to earth.  Then again, one could still map them out.  The book’s about mapping, you see.  And we humans will map anything we can get our hands or telescopes on.

If we can map the moon–and I love how we call it the moon and don’t bother naming it–I guess for the authors the distinction is that everything real happens somewhere, and then there’s fiction and the world of the imagination, which need not be mapped–or at least not with a GSI system.  Or are they talking about something else that happens but not somewhere?

I never did get past that first section, because instead of being sucked into the need for a GSI system, all I’ve done since reading that first line is rack my mind for things that a geographer would say happen without a place.

Thoughts? 

Oh, and I considered naming this entry:  “Why a Liberal Arts Person Should Never be Handed a Physical Sciences Textbook.”  But refrained.  After all, I still find it thought-provoking, although perhaps I’ve gotten caught up on a point considered so tangential to the authors that they dropped it off at the starting point and never looked back. 

Gazing out into Armenia from Ani, Turkey

It wasn’t what I was expecting.

Not that I had great expectations.  Mostly, I just expected the same old.  Which I quite love.

But instead, as I turned the page of my delicious new book–Holderlin’s Hymns and Fragments–and absent-mindedly looked out the living room window, I saw something quite unusual.

Not, I will grant, unusual in and of itself.  After all, people do bathe.  They just don’t usually do so in front of me. 

It turns out that across the street, there’s several floors of the building which have 6-foot high windows in the shower.  In the shower, ladies and gents.  Not just in the bathroom, but in the shower.

At first I thought it was a woman getting dressed, and that she kept her armoire awfully close to the window, and ought be told.  Then I noticed the person manically scramble their hair and thought, hm, when I do that, I’m usually…washing it.   And oftentimes this happens rather far from my armoire.

Then the person, who was becoming, on closer scrutiny, a butt-nekkid man, began a love affair with his body that more closely resembled washing it than dressing it.  Huh. 

I turned the page.  Someone ought tell that man he needs a curtain, I thought.

A few minutes later I looked up again.  What on earth was that guy doing now?  Strange exercises, it appeared.  Then I realized.  He was squeegeeing.  Way too much. 

Seriously, I thought, rather than squeegee your own thin veil away, why not move your bath a few meters away from the window and invest in a curtain?

Marvelous.  Apparently I DO have a room with a view.  And I need curtains. 

Stonework in Sighnaghi, Republic of Georgia

Developing Characters, or: What Doesn’t Kill You…

The other morning I had a guest over for brunch.  In other words, I had to tidy the apartment.  The problem was that my apartment was already tidy. 

This is because I’m writing a book, and writing a book requires time to think.  Most often, taking “time to think” results in my getting caught up retightening the legs of my chairs, vacuuming the couch, cleaning the stove, polishing the floor, and even cutting and filing pieces of wood to hold up tapestries.  With steak knives.  In other words, procrastination leads to a tidy house. 

(Of course, too much predictability is boring, so when my original mission is to do housework, I artfully procrastinate by reading.)

Please, don’t try this at home.  I am a master and cannot promise you’ll have the same results.

So there I was, looking at my altogether far too tidy living room and thinking: I need time to think.  And then I thought, why, I really should clean the coffee table.  A lady never entertains guests on a laptop-and-paper-strewn coffee table.

Now, my coffee table is a Moroccan brass tray table.  In other words, it carries heat.  I always place a large and slim volume between my table and my laptop.  As a lady never overheats her books, I have a constant rotation of books.  Hard-covers being preferable for lap-top writing, I use paperbacks usually for table-top writing.

And so it was that Frog and Toad was on the couch, and Writing the Breakout Novel: Workbook was on the table.  I squinted at it, not out of suspicion, mind you, but because I’d just switched on the lights.  Then I sat down and flipped it open listlessly.  (I was, as you’ll recall, currently tasked with tidying up, and it fell to my lot to procrastinate by reading.) 

The book fell open to the section on antagonists.  I read a few lines of the worksheet Maass, the author, wanted me to fill out.

Meh, I thought. My antagonists are just fine.  I yawned.  And then an idea began to niggle.  I slammed down the book, yanked Frog and Toad back from the shelf and slipped it under the laptop.  And began answering the worksheet.  Egad.  It was amazing.

And bizarre.  I would read a question and think, but I already know… and then I’d type the question anyway and suddenly the groove would kick in.  I’d write sometimes totally what I knew, what I expected…  And then he’d ask me to subvert it, to fight my character.  And suddenly…great stuff.

I’d think I was rehashing, but suddenly—D’s future opened up for me.  I realized what was in store for him—in detail.

I was thrilled and horrified.  I’d just broken thoroughly into Act III.  I knew, finally, what he didn’t.  I had an emotional moment.  I decided to put all my characters through the process—protagonist and antagonist alike. 

And then, of course, as that meant writing, I cleaned the stove instead.

Okay, fine, so I did keep on writing.  Time-to-think rules don’t apply when writers have actually caught hold of a wriggly little fairy of a genius insight, and indeed one must often crush the desire to “think” too much over the stove or under the furniture.  Writing requires that key ingredient my dad used to tell me about:  Glue in the ass.

Anyway, this breakthrough’s been amazing.  I’ve been racing with Act III scenes and have plot points written up for others.  My antagonists are ready for their face-offs, and my heroes are heading to the denouement.  I’m exhilarated to feel it take shape.  It’s a great nexus—my vision, which I’d felt impaired for a long time, is back; and with it my sense of patience is restored.  Emotional truth and structure are both in sight, and the plot’s sense of inevitability is back—although I hope not its predictability.  We’ll see. 

I am utterly realizing anew what they mean when they say that the first draft is the writer telling the story to themselves, and that the subsequent drafts are writing it for others.  The first draft is when I find out what happens, really.  Only then can I craft it into something that will be enjoyable to read.  Then finally is the time to exert power over the text, because I’m not floundering in my own sea of questions.  My spidey-senses tell me that that’ll be a whopper of an experience–rewriting and editing.    But we’re not there yet.  We’re finishing Act III, mehopes.

Other stuff on my to-do list are:  two protagonists that need development and three secondary characters that need work—one of them I have decided is mostly invisible because she’s still the wrong person.  It took me several versions of M to find him fitting, and longer for him to start to move into himself, to develop his grays.  H isn’t there yet.  Maybe H has to go, and someone else take her place.  I wonder how M finally worked and how I can make my other protagonists stronger like him…

Welcome back, heady rush of story!  Welcome back euphoria!  Goodbye housekeeping!!! 

How’re you guys doing?

View from Central Park, New York City

The Apple is an Orange: Update on The Appointment

I’m the first to admit it.  I have my moments.  Oblivious moments.

Like when the protagonist of Fight Club makes his big reveal, at the very end.  You know the moment, when the whole audience gasps and a few shrewd folks nod self-importantly.  Yeah, I neither gasped nor nodded.  You see, dear reader, I thought the character was deluding himself.  Or to be more precise, I thought he was talking rubbish.  I heard him out and waited for truth, for the denouement.  When the credits rolled immediately thereafter, I was gobsmacked.  What had just happened??

What had happened, gentle reader, is that I was an idiot.

However, there are times when it’s not just me being a moron.  Yes, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.  Which leads me to my update on the book I was so excited about last week: The Appointment. 

Turns out, the blurb is misleading.  Utterly misleading.  Which was effed up.

Now, if I’m handed a mug of steaming beverage and told it’s tea, when it’s in fact coffee, regardless of whether I prefer coffee or tea, my first reaction upon tasting it is: this is wrong.  Something’s very wrong.

The Appointment was well-written and interesting.  But that blurb is rudely misleading.  At a certain point one stops savoring each moment for itself, and instead begins waiting for what the blurb suggests is a turning point—the turning point.  The story.  Which is a disservice to any book, interesting or not.

It’s one thing not to judge a book by its graphic cover.  But one does hope the blurb is honest.  If you do read the book, for your own sake and the author’s, imagine you haven’t read the last line of the blurb, about the street with the fearful thing that terrifies the heroine more than her appointment.  It’s a misstatement and it ruins the read by setting up your expectations for something that is not the story at all.

Annoyance.  Meh.  And now to write a happier post.  But I didn’t want to basically mis-blurb the book myself by not warning you…

Mapping History, a modern quest

I suppose my dad was doing it to educate us, and not simply to stave away boredom with bouts of torture.  Back then I thought it was more like the latter, or that he had some sort of tic, and when he saw a map he couldn’t help but to begin interrogating us on capitals. 

And he would never pick easy countries.  God forbid he’d say France so I could pipe up with Paris and he could gaze proudly at his progeny.  Oh no.  It was always places like Uganda, Laos or the Canary Islands.  And Iceland.  Rejkjavik was my brother’s one weak-point; and he was my eternal opponent in these games which showed off some innate talent of his that I lacked—maybe memory?  I don’t recall.

The result of these childhood games has been catastrophic.  I now play capital city pop quizzes with my own students; turns out it’s not torture but riotous fun.  Who knew. 

Yesterday I called up HR to ask a question about benefits.  The woman who picked up asked me to spell my name.  I did what I always do, and spelt it out using country names.  (If you had a D in your name, would you say dog?  No.)  Obviously I use Dominican Republic, which is much more worthy indeed. 

Hey, at least I don’t wait for others to amuse me.

Anyway, turns out this woman was a Geography major in college.  Hm.  I forced myself to ask about my benefits and not take up the diverting news.  Ooh, I succeeded mightily well, I thought as I hung up, my question answered. 

I commended myself on my focus, and on my grasp of priorities and professionalism.  I continued to objectively commend myself some several minutes longer–December, after all, is a month for decadence.  And it was pleasantly distracting.  It was possible to completely forget the allure of a Geography major so close at hand.

Indeed, I had quite forgotten it, and it meant nothing at all to me.

Do you believe me yet? 

Flash forward two seconds after hanging up:  I’m at the computer again.

But the woman is a walking map, I thought to myself, tapping away on the keyboard.  How could I possibly let the opportunity pass to ask her questions of great import and irrelevance?  I mean, would that be the responsible thing to do?  Obviously not.  Not on a global level, at any rate. 

My head cleared.  I knew what I had to do. 

Yes, gentle Reader:  I called her back. 

“Uh, could you tell me the history of cartography, and also its modern execution?”

First she used words I’d never heard before–I scribbled anxiously, unable to figure out spelling or language of origin–and then she cracked my little dreams thoroughly—“you mean all cartography is done on computers these days and no-one romantically pencils maps?  Not even hot antique-looking ones in sepia?”

“No,” she answered, unmoved by the death of romanticism.

At my strangled sigh, she explained doing it by hand was impractical.  Then she offered to lend me a book on cartography, which, she warned me, “might be a little over your head.”  I nodded over the phone; technology is not my strong suite.

Ah well.  That was yesterday.  Today I have the book in my grubby paws, and am gleeful at its (temporary) acquisition.  I love these trinkets, these treasures that everyone has, if you just ask the right questions.

An hour after we hung up, a student came in to take care of a quick matter.  As he gave me the necessary paperwork I asked him, “What do you know about cartography?”

“What do you need to know?” he asked.

“Everything.”  Catsmile.  “Spill.”

"There's a road," he'd said, pointing. There was no road. But that's another tale.