For someone who has enjoyed movies for a long time and claims to be something of a movie buff (though nowhere near an expert, as this post will make abundantly clear!), it is embarrassing for me to note that I recently watched Orson Welles’ 1941 classic Citizen Kane for the first time a few weeks ago. Of course I had heard all of the hype about it, and was aware that it is always listed at the very top of most lists of the greatest films of all time – including, most notably perhaps, the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list. That list was completely revised recently, but Welles’ film did not lose its secure hold on the top slot. I had a pretty good idea that whenever I got around to it I would find something to enjoy and be interested in… but truth be told, I did not expect it to engage me and stir up my fascination nearly as much as it did. By any standard, Citizen Kane is a truly exceptional work of art that is a profound commentary not only on American culture, but also on our common human condition.
Before going any further here, however, I want to publicly acknowledge and thank a good friend of mine, who is the one who pushed hard for me to watch it when I sheepishly admitted to him that I never had… to protect his identity I will use a pseudonym, but he certainly knows who he is. So to Mr. Braxton, I can only say: you were right to insist upon it, pal. You have more than earned your standing as a “go to” critic of movies (not to mention movies/books!) in my opinion…
Anyway, I came to Citizen Kane almost completely cold. All I knew about it was that it was widely considered one of the best, if not THE best, movies ever made, and that it made Orson Welles a Hollywood legend at the ripe old age of 26. Beyond that, I didn’t know a darn thing. Literally the only other thing I could have conjured up if asked about it was an image: a HUGE placard bearing the likeness of a moustachioed Orson Welles behind a podium, and the real Orson Welles (with moustache) thundering from said podium in the foreground. From this image I assumed the movie had something to do with politics. And that is the sum total of everything I ever knew about the film up until a few weeks ago.
The story, for the three people left on earth besides me who didn’t or don’t know, presents to us the life of the titular character, who is based on the real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst built up an empire based on his ownership of scores of newspapers across the United States, and amassed a personal fortune that rivaled those of Morgan and Rockefeller. But more intriguing to the public (and richer fodder for a Hollywood film!) were the details of Hearst’s personal life: he weathered several broken marriages and seamy scandals, and died alone in a spectacular mansion he had built for himself, which he filled with archeological treasures he had plundered from all over the world. These were not treasures he went out and found himself, mind you: they were priceless items that, well, turned out not to be.
On the surface, then, Kane is essentially a rags-to-riches story about a lonely child abandoned by his parents who rises to the upper echelons of both business and social circles, but can’t ever seem to find the true happiness and peace that eludes him all along. What’s the big deal, then? Isn’t that the plot for countless stories and films that have been made? Well, yes, it is… but in this case it’s all about execution. The true genius of Citizen Kane, in my opinion, is not so much in the story itself, but in the way it is told: the technique of Welles’ filmmaking, the unusual narrative structure, and perhaps most of all, the use of images and visual cues to “pull back the curtain” and reveal the profound moral layers and depths hidden within a seemingly conventional narrative. I’ll briefly touch on the three of these.
1. The Technique – Now I know next to nothing about actual filmmaking technique, so maybe I better clarify here. When I say “technique” I am just talking about the way it is shot, the thought and craft that went into presenting each scene to the viewer. Admittedly, I listened to much of the commentary track (in this case it happened to be from Roger Ebert) on the DVD, so I did actually learn something about the technical aspects… such as Welles’ experimenting with a shooting technique called “deep focus” in order to make sure that items in the background of a shot remained as clear and distinct to the viewer as items/actors in the foreground. But I can’t get into the technical side of the film too much here simply because I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. No, what I mean is the visual and emotional impact the film has upon you from the moment you start watching it. The opening of the film is a perfect example. First, you get these ominous and brooding shots of a haunted-looking castle high upon a hill behind a “No Trespassing” sign, and you witness the dying gasps of an unknown man secluded in a high bedroom, desperately clinging to a child’s toy and whispering a final, enigmatic word: “Rosebud.” (The mystery of what the word really means to the dying man runs throughout the film, and I gather, is still widely debated and discussed to this very day!) It’s an unforgettable opening that remains as puzzling and haunting in 2008 as it must have been to its first viewers in the theater. Next, you get a spot-on parody of an old-time newsreel which announces the death of one Charles Foster Kane, and reviews his life in true sensational, gossip-tinged American media style. You don’t realize it at the time of course, but what you’re getting is a preview of the whole story that’s about to unfold in front of you in the next hour and a half. These two contrasting and equally fascinating opening sequences set you up for a film experience that, at the time, utterly re-defined what American cinema could be… Welles blew the doors off creatively, pulling out all the stops in a virtuoso visual storytelling clinic. Throughout the film, striking images and powerful scenes abound. Citizen Kane is justly famous for its low camera angles, making characters appear larger than life and giving us an extraordinarily full view of the interior sets. It’s as if Welles said to himself, “Let me go through every established technique in Hollywood so that I can defy them all.” Stunning close-ups of objects and faces contrast with wide-angle panoramas of newsrooms and warehouses. The film is quite obviously the work of an ambitious young artist who’s not afraid to experiment and aim high.
2. The unusual narrative structure – Much of the genius of Welles’ film lies in the decision to wrap the story of Kane’s life around the mysterious utterance of that one word on his deathbed, “Rosebud.” Rather than tell the story in conventional, linear “biopic” style, we are presented with his death scene first (as described above) and the announcement of his demise in the media. From there, we are introduced to an investigative reporter who is given the task to uncover why Kane may have uttered this final word, and what it meant to him. In order to do so, the reporter needs to go and find those people who were closest to Kane – former colleagues, benefactors, ex-spouses – and interview them to try and piece the puzzle together. So the story of Kane’s life is told in a series of memories and flashbacks, delivered from multiple perspectives and points of view. I thought this was a fascinating device and a particularly ingenious way to tell the story of a man surrounded by mystery and speculation, a man who appears larger than life itself and yet died alone in “quiet desperation,” surrounded by his riches that ultimately meant very little to him. Another advantage of the story-telling method is that you can see first-hand the effect Kane’s egotism and ambition had on those closest to him, how he alienated and let down those few people who he allowed to get past his persona. The story of Kane’s life has so many layers of meaning, but one of the most powerful I think is the way that his sense of abandonment as a young child left a hole in him he could never fill, and permanently crippled his ability to be vulnerable to anyone around him. Like so many others, his desire for power and control thinly masked a strong sense of inadequacy and personal insecurity – and this combination makes it nearly impossible for a man to maintain a close and intimate relationship with anyone, be they a friend, confidant or spouse. Finally, the “investigative” approach enables Welles to jump around chronologically in the narrative, which meant that actors had to play their characters at multiple ages – Welles starts the film as a lean, handsome businessman full of charisma and vigor, and ends it as a fat, balding man with a moustache and a permanent scowl. These days it is commonplace to see actors take on different ages and don make-up to appear older than they are, but at the time I think it was very rare to see an actor take on so many different looks for one role. Welles is utterly different from one scene to the next in this film, and it is a performance of astounding range and depth.
3. The use of images and visuals – To me, this is the best part of Citizen Kane, where the genius and artistic vision really pay off. What stays with you after all is said and done are certain haunting key scenes and images that linger long in the mind and seem to capture the essence of the storyline more than any single line of dialog. Take, for example, the famous swirling "snow" inside the child's snow globe that Kane is holding as he breathes his last breath, and the slow fall of the same globe from his hand to the floor at the moment of death. Or the scene where Kane, in a rage after his second wife leaves him, trashes a room in his house and then slowly walks down a hallway in his lonely castle, mirrors on either side of the hallway reflecting him infinitely to the left and right, as if to say his sadness is without end. Or the scene described earlier when Kane is campaigning for public office, standing at a podium dwarfed by an enormous image of himself, emphasizing his hubris and his larger-than-life persona. Or, perhaps most strikingly, the final scenes of the film, which pan widely over a vast warehouse of his "stuff," his archeological treasures and furniture - the shots not only ingeniously include props from most of the other scenes in the movie as sort of a visual re-cap of all that has come before in the film, but also poignantly reveal the ultimate emptiness of Kane's life, as he has built up this museum-like fantasy land around himself but has no one left to share it with. I won't say what the final image of the film is, but like everything before it is an ingenious shot, and neatly wraps up the mystery running through the entire length of the film with a profundity no words could capture. There are so many indelible images in this film it would be impossible to recount them all.
All of this is only to scratch the surface of this complex morality tale which has so much to say about American culture and human nature. I don't pretend for a moment to have encapsulated all that is good and notable about Citizen Kane here, but I do hope I have provided enough of a taste of it to intrigue those who haven't yet seen it, and maybe even inspire them to give it a watch. On every level imaginable, it is a film that inspires and fascinates. Anyone with even the slightest interest in film will come away rewarded from Welles' ingenious and innovative character study.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 42
Writing in Lent
At least the good news is that after many months' delay, and having written a new short story and an essay in the interim as reported in my last journal, I am back at work on the Indiana novel. I am working on Chapter V now, but still in the first 'scene' of the chapter; I have a long road to hoe in this chapter alone, before I can even think of what comes after that. But at least I have gotten a start on it once again, considering the fact that it was November 6 when I finished the preceding chapter. Although I gave myself until age 40 to complete the draft of the novel, my recent pace has put even such a generous goal in jeopardy!
This chapter takes on a lot of meaning for me, for a few reasons. On a practical level, although the previous four have been loaded pretty heavily with a lot of characters and plotlines, so many that it seems questionable whether I will be able to keep all of the balls in the air, this fifth chapter is attempting to take on even more. It has to accomplish a lot of things, and do so if at all possible in a similar amount of space as the other chapters. This is the first chapter, for example, of the whole novel so far that will attempt to make several jumps in time instead of being set in one year. The first three chapters of the story were set at different months in the year 1924; Chapter IV was the first to move ahead, but it was all set in 1927; this new chapter will span from 1929, when it opens, to 1932, where it will end. This makes my challenge more difficult than it has been already, since in some way you need to account for the space in between those jumps; you have to let the reader know at least the most essential information about what has happened in between, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't bog the chapter down OR make the reader feel cheated for what he or she has missed.
I am facing that challenge now as the chapter opens, because I went from the conception of Walter & Greta Brogan's son, Luke, at the end of Chapter IV (I assure you, I spared the reader any description of the mechanics of what took place, since you KNOW I would bungle any attempt to make that sort of thing read well!) to the early summer of 1929 at the beginning of Chapter V when Luke is already a chubby 9-month-old. Thus the reader got none of Greta's pregnancy and was not a witness to the birth of their son. I felt it was not necessary to attempt to write a whole 'labor and delivery' segment of the book, and I didn't think I'd do such a good job at it anyway. My vision for this book extends all the way to 1942, so I have to leave some stuff out somewhere along the line! For me the most important thing is to establish that they were able to start a family after all, and that for the rest of the novel Walter Brogan will be embroiled in his efforts to provide for them all during the difficult circumstances of the Depression and the World War II era.
And speaking of labor, although not the child-bearing kind, the entire book to me feels like a massive labor at this stage. It has been coming hard and slow when it comes at all, and I have been feeling the difficulty of what I am trying to do in the most acute way in the last few months. Working two jobs, under very tight and often stressful financial circumstances, awaiting a third child in addition to the two very active little girls I have now: all of these things make the attempt to write a real novel absurd if not outright irresponsible: should I not be spending whatever time I can put into this work doing other things? Even when I try to stay true to my original vision and set these distracting questions aside, I find when I sit down that the work has felt strained and unfocused, and I feel the burden of my own creative vision, since I feel like I have so much more ground to cover and make so little headway in covering it. The idea of finishing by the time I turn 40 now seems ridiculous where it once seemed crazy to give myself so much time.
So why do it? I ask myself this all the time. Especially now in the season of Lent, one feels the need to strip away things that don't matter and focus on things that do. Does my writing belong in the former group? I honestly find this a hard question to answer right now. I do know that it doesn't feel like it doesn't matter to me; writing for me is very serious, it always has been; I don't do it for silly reasons. I do it because it feels necessary for me to live. But lately I haven't been doing the best job of making it easier for the people I provide for to live, or at least live at the level of comfort that I want for them. Is there more I can do - especially since the writing I am doing now doesn't seem to be of the best quality? Should I be focusing on other things?
During Lent I have a personal tradition of trying to spend time engaged in what they used to call Lectio Divina, or spiritual reading. I know how grandiose this sounds but the truth is that if I don't set time aside to do it in Lent I find I don't do too much of it at all the rest of the year, something I'd like to rectify at least to some degree. Right now I am reading a book by Thomas Merton, one of my favorite spiritual writers, called No Man is an Island, and in the book I found the following quotes which I must say have hit me where I am living now as I have struggled with these questions: 'All vocations are intended by God to manifest His love in the world. For each special calling gives a man some particular place in the mystery of Christ, gives him something to do for the salvation of all mankind.' Merton also writes, 'Each vocation has for its aim the propagation of divine life in the world.' I have often said that to me writing this novel, if I can really do it, feels to me like my 'life's work'. The question is whether I really have been called to do this sort of thing by God, and if so, can I make sure that my work actually contributes in the way that Merton describes above. If I can complete the work in such a way that it does, it has not been a waste of time. But if I give up or cannot do it, it has been a waste. And if I think that is where it's going it would be better to give up now. But on the other hand, if I really believe I have been called to write by God, then I need to do it as well as I am able. Merton also writes, 'By doing things badly we make ourselves less real.' If I'm going to do it I want to give it my best and that means working at it and not giving up.
I have been working on my novel for two years next month; if I make it to the end of Chapter V I am done with one part of three. If I follow my original plan I have at least 2 1/2 more years of work ahead of me on the book and I don't have any reason to think my life will become easier financially, spiritually, or materially in the meantime. But I am not prepared to give up and I still believe I can achieve something with it that will be glorifying in some way, ultimately, to God. Rainier Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet suggested to his youthful protege that he ask himself very honestly if he believes he can live without writing poetry. If the answer is yes, Rilke suggested, his course of action was simple: stop writing it now and get on with his life doing other things. But if the answer was No, however, Rilke's advice to him was to stop worrying about it and get down to the work. It helps me to remind myself of this during times of struggle, and this is one of those times. I don't expect the struggle to end for a long time, but that is all right. I don't want success to be handed to me on a platter, and I can't expect to earn God's reward either by cruising into Heaven on auto-pilot. I must put in the work.
At least the good news is that after many months' delay, and having written a new short story and an essay in the interim as reported in my last journal, I am back at work on the Indiana novel. I am working on Chapter V now, but still in the first 'scene' of the chapter; I have a long road to hoe in this chapter alone, before I can even think of what comes after that. But at least I have gotten a start on it once again, considering the fact that it was November 6 when I finished the preceding chapter. Although I gave myself until age 40 to complete the draft of the novel, my recent pace has put even such a generous goal in jeopardy!
This chapter takes on a lot of meaning for me, for a few reasons. On a practical level, although the previous four have been loaded pretty heavily with a lot of characters and plotlines, so many that it seems questionable whether I will be able to keep all of the balls in the air, this fifth chapter is attempting to take on even more. It has to accomplish a lot of things, and do so if at all possible in a similar amount of space as the other chapters. This is the first chapter, for example, of the whole novel so far that will attempt to make several jumps in time instead of being set in one year. The first three chapters of the story were set at different months in the year 1924; Chapter IV was the first to move ahead, but it was all set in 1927; this new chapter will span from 1929, when it opens, to 1932, where it will end. This makes my challenge more difficult than it has been already, since in some way you need to account for the space in between those jumps; you have to let the reader know at least the most essential information about what has happened in between, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't bog the chapter down OR make the reader feel cheated for what he or she has missed.
I am facing that challenge now as the chapter opens, because I went from the conception of Walter & Greta Brogan's son, Luke, at the end of Chapter IV (I assure you, I spared the reader any description of the mechanics of what took place, since you KNOW I would bungle any attempt to make that sort of thing read well!) to the early summer of 1929 at the beginning of Chapter V when Luke is already a chubby 9-month-old. Thus the reader got none of Greta's pregnancy and was not a witness to the birth of their son. I felt it was not necessary to attempt to write a whole 'labor and delivery' segment of the book, and I didn't think I'd do such a good job at it anyway. My vision for this book extends all the way to 1942, so I have to leave some stuff out somewhere along the line! For me the most important thing is to establish that they were able to start a family after all, and that for the rest of the novel Walter Brogan will be embroiled in his efforts to provide for them all during the difficult circumstances of the Depression and the World War II era.
And speaking of labor, although not the child-bearing kind, the entire book to me feels like a massive labor at this stage. It has been coming hard and slow when it comes at all, and I have been feeling the difficulty of what I am trying to do in the most acute way in the last few months. Working two jobs, under very tight and often stressful financial circumstances, awaiting a third child in addition to the two very active little girls I have now: all of these things make the attempt to write a real novel absurd if not outright irresponsible: should I not be spending whatever time I can put into this work doing other things? Even when I try to stay true to my original vision and set these distracting questions aside, I find when I sit down that the work has felt strained and unfocused, and I feel the burden of my own creative vision, since I feel like I have so much more ground to cover and make so little headway in covering it. The idea of finishing by the time I turn 40 now seems ridiculous where it once seemed crazy to give myself so much time.
So why do it? I ask myself this all the time. Especially now in the season of Lent, one feels the need to strip away things that don't matter and focus on things that do. Does my writing belong in the former group? I honestly find this a hard question to answer right now. I do know that it doesn't feel like it doesn't matter to me; writing for me is very serious, it always has been; I don't do it for silly reasons. I do it because it feels necessary for me to live. But lately I haven't been doing the best job of making it easier for the people I provide for to live, or at least live at the level of comfort that I want for them. Is there more I can do - especially since the writing I am doing now doesn't seem to be of the best quality? Should I be focusing on other things?
During Lent I have a personal tradition of trying to spend time engaged in what they used to call Lectio Divina, or spiritual reading. I know how grandiose this sounds but the truth is that if I don't set time aside to do it in Lent I find I don't do too much of it at all the rest of the year, something I'd like to rectify at least to some degree. Right now I am reading a book by Thomas Merton, one of my favorite spiritual writers, called No Man is an Island, and in the book I found the following quotes which I must say have hit me where I am living now as I have struggled with these questions: 'All vocations are intended by God to manifest His love in the world. For each special calling gives a man some particular place in the mystery of Christ, gives him something to do for the salvation of all mankind.' Merton also writes, 'Each vocation has for its aim the propagation of divine life in the world.' I have often said that to me writing this novel, if I can really do it, feels to me like my 'life's work'. The question is whether I really have been called to do this sort of thing by God, and if so, can I make sure that my work actually contributes in the way that Merton describes above. If I can complete the work in such a way that it does, it has not been a waste of time. But if I give up or cannot do it, it has been a waste. And if I think that is where it's going it would be better to give up now. But on the other hand, if I really believe I have been called to write by God, then I need to do it as well as I am able. Merton also writes, 'By doing things badly we make ourselves less real.' If I'm going to do it I want to give it my best and that means working at it and not giving up.
I have been working on my novel for two years next month; if I make it to the end of Chapter V I am done with one part of three. If I follow my original plan I have at least 2 1/2 more years of work ahead of me on the book and I don't have any reason to think my life will become easier financially, spiritually, or materially in the meantime. But I am not prepared to give up and I still believe I can achieve something with it that will be glorifying in some way, ultimately, to God. Rainier Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet suggested to his youthful protege that he ask himself very honestly if he believes he can live without writing poetry. If the answer is yes, Rilke suggested, his course of action was simple: stop writing it now and get on with his life doing other things. But if the answer was No, however, Rilke's advice to him was to stop worrying about it and get down to the work. It helps me to remind myself of this during times of struggle, and this is one of those times. I don't expect the struggle to end for a long time, but that is all right. I don't want success to be handed to me on a platter, and I can't expect to earn God's reward either by cruising into Heaven on auto-pilot. I must put in the work.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Duke Altum's POTM #60
Ha - did anyone notice the subtle change in the title of this series there?? Since I don't seem to be able to keep up with this blog as regularly as I'd like to, calling this series of occasional great poems the "Poem of the Week" series seems just a trifle, well, optimistic. So, just like that, is has now been officially re-named the Poem of the Month series! See how easy that was! But the same great, albeit sporatic, content will continue... so keep on tuning in!
This month is a beautiful poem - well, honestly, more of a prayer than poem - from Franz Wright... a Lenten poet if there ever was one! (Wright's poetry often deals with repentence, salvation, grace unearned, delivery from or contention with spiritual and emotional suffering, etc.) The last eight lines alone are well worth the price of admission (i.e. reading this blather first!), and I appreciate them a lot personally as they articulate a prayer I have sometimes uttered in my own heart, but of course lacked the words to articulate as well. Amazing stuff.
*******
Cloudless Snowfall
Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody's put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.
This month is a beautiful poem - well, honestly, more of a prayer than poem - from Franz Wright... a Lenten poet if there ever was one! (Wright's poetry often deals with repentence, salvation, grace unearned, delivery from or contention with spiritual and emotional suffering, etc.) The last eight lines alone are well worth the price of admission (i.e. reading this blather first!), and I appreciate them a lot personally as they articulate a prayer I have sometimes uttered in my own heart, but of course lacked the words to articulate as well. Amazing stuff.
*******
Cloudless Snowfall
Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody's put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Swinging to the Music
A review of U23D
directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington
Concert films are almost always boring. No matter how much one may love the band or the artist, anyone who has been to a rock concert knows that viewing a film of a group performing live is nowhere near the experience of being there in person. After the first few numbers, it amounts to listening to the same songs you’ve heard over and over in a slightly different format and tempo. What you don’t get is all of the sights and smells, the pulse of the music in your bones, the strange but pleasing communion you experience with a large gathering of like-minded people for a temporary period of time that is somehow all the more transporting for that.
The challenges to producing a successful concert film would seem all the more formidable for a group as huge in every way possible (except perhaps the physical stature of the members) as U2, the Irish megaband that has been an international phenomenon for decades now. One of the reasons their popularity has become so pervasive across the globe is that their concerts are more than just a live performance. A U2 concert is an event, a spectacle in almost every sense, anchored firmly by the members’ unique talents to entertain with passion and vigor. These men are gifted artists all, blessed with the good fortune to have discovered not so much fame and wealth, but a clear vocation. U2 knows why they’re here. They are doing what they were born to do, and if you’ve seen their shows you know this is true.
The challenge for filmmakers Catherine Owens, a designer of U2’s stage presentations, and Mark Pellington, a film and television director (The Mothman Prophecies, “Cold Case”), was to provide an experience that, while necessarily falling just short of “you are there” verisimilitude, is nonetheless as grandiose and thrilling as this truly great band’s audience expects. In U23D, with the help of recent (and quite remarkable) film technology, they unquestionably succeed. The first concert film ever to be shot entirely by digital, three-dimensional cameras, U23D can rightfully be considered a landmark motion picture, and also one of the most satisfying marriages of form and subject to be seen on the big, big screen in many years.
The three-dimensional aspect of the film is a gimmick. Some may find it over the top at best, and off-putting or even irritating at worst. Entering the theater, the viewer is handed 3-D glasses, and for the first several minutes of the show I found it slightly difficult to get used to the sometimes-blurred or replicated images on the screen. I found, however, that the eyes adjust to it, and to me the handful of moments in the film when the 3-D imagery really works best are worth the temporary disorientation. Besides, it’s a fun gimmick; when was the last time you saw a 3-D movie? (I realized I hadn’t seen one at all.) At one particular moment in the film, the neck of Adam Clayton’s bass appears to be reaching out over one of your shoulders; in another fascinating touch, during the band’s classic anti-violence anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, all of the crowd noise is consigned to the background, and while Bono sings the line, ‘Wipe your tears away’ directly into the camera, he reaches out and seems to actually wipe your own cheeks.
By deploying a dizzying array of camera angles, close-ups, and breathtaking wide-scale shots that fully encapsulate the sheer magnitude of the frenzied South-Central American crowds (the film was shot in Mexico and Argentina primarily) and the astounding stage and lighting designs, the filmmakers have done an extraordinary job of approximating to the fullest extent possible the sensual and visual barrage of a U2 concert. They deserve credit for their expansive vision and execution of this hugely entertaining film, which is best experienced on the IMAX screens it opened on initially.
Still, the ultimate credit goes to the band itself, who have turned themselves into worldwide icons by force of their own extraordinary talent and creative bravado. Some people seem put-upon by U2’s tremendous popularity and seemingly infinite success. For others, this is made even worse by their relatively clean reputation and by Bono’s global stature as an activist against hunger and poverty who seems at times to have more gravitas than presidents and heads of state. But the essential fact remains that for U2 to be as massively popular as they are, and for their shows to deliver the huge payoff one comes to expect, the songs themselves have to be great. It may be stating the obvious that a song like “Oops, I Did It Again” performed in the same venue with the same stage and lighting would not come off nearly the same way, but sometimes it’s easy to take fine songwriting for granted. The music viewers will see and feel in this concert film consists of some of the most spirited, unique and satisfying songs in rock music history – “Where The Streets Have No Name”, “New Year's Day”, “Bullet the Blue Sky”, “With Or Without You”, and so forth. There’s a good reason classics are classics; they’re built to last.
Lest anyone still believes that U2’s best work is behind them, however, nowhere is the aforementioned greatness so evident as in the performance of “Vertigo” from the band’s last album, which provides U23D’s most electrifying moment. The opening salvo of the film, this bombastic rock gem explodes every asset of U2 as a live act in one spectacular burst.
As an entertainer and vocalist, Bono is a force of nature, defying his age and whatever shelf-life a set human of vocal chords might have. He almost literally leaps off the screen. The Edge, U2’s extraordinary guitarist, is a technical genius, and performs with such cool professionalism and ease that one wonders if he is programmed. And the rhythm section of the band, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. on drums, play so well together after 30 years that you expect their flawless execution as a matter of course. I can’t think of a better compliment to pay to these fine musicians.
By the time you reach the first chorus of “Vertigo” and hear Edge’s call to the Spanish-speaking audience of ¿Donde esta? you’re ready with your answer: Right here, in the beauty of the moment, along with everyone else, no matter where in this world we’re from. And for at least 80 minutes out of your busy life, there’s no place you’d rather be.
directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington
Concert films are almost always boring. No matter how much one may love the band or the artist, anyone who has been to a rock concert knows that viewing a film of a group performing live is nowhere near the experience of being there in person. After the first few numbers, it amounts to listening to the same songs you’ve heard over and over in a slightly different format and tempo. What you don’t get is all of the sights and smells, the pulse of the music in your bones, the strange but pleasing communion you experience with a large gathering of like-minded people for a temporary period of time that is somehow all the more transporting for that.
The challenges to producing a successful concert film would seem all the more formidable for a group as huge in every way possible (except perhaps the physical stature of the members) as U2, the Irish megaband that has been an international phenomenon for decades now. One of the reasons their popularity has become so pervasive across the globe is that their concerts are more than just a live performance. A U2 concert is an event, a spectacle in almost every sense, anchored firmly by the members’ unique talents to entertain with passion and vigor. These men are gifted artists all, blessed with the good fortune to have discovered not so much fame and wealth, but a clear vocation. U2 knows why they’re here. They are doing what they were born to do, and if you’ve seen their shows you know this is true.
The challenge for filmmakers Catherine Owens, a designer of U2’s stage presentations, and Mark Pellington, a film and television director (The Mothman Prophecies, “Cold Case”), was to provide an experience that, while necessarily falling just short of “you are there” verisimilitude, is nonetheless as grandiose and thrilling as this truly great band’s audience expects. In U23D, with the help of recent (and quite remarkable) film technology, they unquestionably succeed. The first concert film ever to be shot entirely by digital, three-dimensional cameras, U23D can rightfully be considered a landmark motion picture, and also one of the most satisfying marriages of form and subject to be seen on the big, big screen in many years.
The three-dimensional aspect of the film is a gimmick. Some may find it over the top at best, and off-putting or even irritating at worst. Entering the theater, the viewer is handed 3-D glasses, and for the first several minutes of the show I found it slightly difficult to get used to the sometimes-blurred or replicated images on the screen. I found, however, that the eyes adjust to it, and to me the handful of moments in the film when the 3-D imagery really works best are worth the temporary disorientation. Besides, it’s a fun gimmick; when was the last time you saw a 3-D movie? (I realized I hadn’t seen one at all.) At one particular moment in the film, the neck of Adam Clayton’s bass appears to be reaching out over one of your shoulders; in another fascinating touch, during the band’s classic anti-violence anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, all of the crowd noise is consigned to the background, and while Bono sings the line, ‘Wipe your tears away’ directly into the camera, he reaches out and seems to actually wipe your own cheeks.
By deploying a dizzying array of camera angles, close-ups, and breathtaking wide-scale shots that fully encapsulate the sheer magnitude of the frenzied South-Central American crowds (the film was shot in Mexico and Argentina primarily) and the astounding stage and lighting designs, the filmmakers have done an extraordinary job of approximating to the fullest extent possible the sensual and visual barrage of a U2 concert. They deserve credit for their expansive vision and execution of this hugely entertaining film, which is best experienced on the IMAX screens it opened on initially.
Still, the ultimate credit goes to the band itself, who have turned themselves into worldwide icons by force of their own extraordinary talent and creative bravado. Some people seem put-upon by U2’s tremendous popularity and seemingly infinite success. For others, this is made even worse by their relatively clean reputation and by Bono’s global stature as an activist against hunger and poverty who seems at times to have more gravitas than presidents and heads of state. But the essential fact remains that for U2 to be as massively popular as they are, and for their shows to deliver the huge payoff one comes to expect, the songs themselves have to be great. It may be stating the obvious that a song like “Oops, I Did It Again” performed in the same venue with the same stage and lighting would not come off nearly the same way, but sometimes it’s easy to take fine songwriting for granted. The music viewers will see and feel in this concert film consists of some of the most spirited, unique and satisfying songs in rock music history – “Where The Streets Have No Name”, “New Year's Day”, “Bullet the Blue Sky”, “With Or Without You”, and so forth. There’s a good reason classics are classics; they’re built to last.
Lest anyone still believes that U2’s best work is behind them, however, nowhere is the aforementioned greatness so evident as in the performance of “Vertigo” from the band’s last album, which provides U23D’s most electrifying moment. The opening salvo of the film, this bombastic rock gem explodes every asset of U2 as a live act in one spectacular burst.
As an entertainer and vocalist, Bono is a force of nature, defying his age and whatever shelf-life a set human of vocal chords might have. He almost literally leaps off the screen. The Edge, U2’s extraordinary guitarist, is a technical genius, and performs with such cool professionalism and ease that one wonders if he is programmed. And the rhythm section of the band, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. on drums, play so well together after 30 years that you expect their flawless execution as a matter of course. I can’t think of a better compliment to pay to these fine musicians.
By the time you reach the first chorus of “Vertigo” and hear Edge’s call to the Spanish-speaking audience of ¿Donde esta? you’re ready with your answer: Right here, in the beauty of the moment, along with everyone else, no matter where in this world we’re from. And for at least 80 minutes out of your busy life, there’s no place you’d rather be.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
TST is Back... and Nationwide!
Well, not really. That was just a lame homage to classic ZZ Top. I once had a job as a janitor cleaning schools during the summer vacations, and for some reason the "soundtrack" of those days for me is loaded with vintage, before-my-time ZZ Top, from the period when their albums were still being released with Spanish titles: stuff like "Cheap Sunglasses," "I'm Bad (I'm Nationwide)," "I Thank You" and of course, who could forget, "Jesus Just Left Chicago." I'm talking way before the "Sharp Dressed Man," "Gimme All Your Lovin'," "Legs" days.
Whatever. The point is, we ARE back, after at least a months' worth of technical issues, delays, and the usual craziness of life as working, young-children-raising family men.
As you can see, The Secret Thread has received a bit of an upgrade: at least, we hope it's an upgrade. We're still working out the kinks of the new template here, but in general it should be a bit easier to read and more pleasant to the eye.
But the same great content (if you're going to laugh, laugh here!) will continue... coming up soon, Mutt will provide and extended review and offer up some reflections on the spectacle that is U23D (U2's 3D concert film that is currently playing in IMAX theaters across the U.S.). And I'm planning on ringing in with another list, just for the fun of it: my Top 10 Road Novels of all time. So, please keep on stopping by... and enjoy the ride!
Whatever. The point is, we ARE back, after at least a months' worth of technical issues, delays, and the usual craziness of life as working, young-children-raising family men.
As you can see, The Secret Thread has received a bit of an upgrade: at least, we hope it's an upgrade. We're still working out the kinks of the new template here, but in general it should be a bit easier to read and more pleasant to the eye.
But the same great content (if you're going to laugh, laugh here!) will continue... coming up soon, Mutt will provide and extended review and offer up some reflections on the spectacle that is U23D (U2's 3D concert film that is currently playing in IMAX theaters across the U.S.). And I'm planning on ringing in with another list, just for the fun of it: my Top 10 Road Novels of all time. So, please keep on stopping by... and enjoy the ride!
Sunday, January 06, 2008
A (Post-)Christmas Meditation from Hans Urs von Balthasar
Christmas has already whizzed by us and we are all well on our way into the new year, 2008. However, on this Epiphany Sunday, before the season completely vanishes into our individual archives of memory, I wanted to share a very interesting and profound scriptural meditation from the great 20th century Swiss priest and theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Lately I have been richly rewarded by starting off each day reading from his posthumously-collected series of scriptural reflections, You Have Words of Eternal Life. Each short reflection takes a brief phrase directly from scripture -- such as the title phrase -- and goes off from it in fascinating, and very often quite unexpected, directions. These were among the last writings he was working on just before he died, and the sense you get as you read them is of a wise old theologian/priest sharing with you the various and valuable fruits of a lifetime of thinking, praying and studying the scriptures. This experience, I am convinced, is the reason that each meditation seems to provide me with an angle on a familiar passage of scripture I had never considered before. The collection is a wonderful blessing from one of the most important and gifted theologians of our time.
I read this one only a few days ago, but then realized it would work very well as a meditation before/during the Christmas season (which, according to the Church, we are still very much in the midst of, even though the stores and homes have all packed away their decorations and lights for another year!). I thought it would be worth sharing on this blog, and as I do so, I wish everyone a blessed New Year -- one that brings with it new and exciting encounters with Jesus, our Emmanuel ("God with us").
*******
"Are You the One Who is to Come?"
The question that a captive John the Baptist sends to Jesus by way of two of his disciples (Matt. 11:3) is the all-encompassing question of the Old Covenant directed at the New. Drawing together all of Israel's longing, John had expected the eschatological Judge who would also be Israel's Savior. He spent only a short time in Jesus' company (John 4:1-2) -- his arrest caused Jesus to return to Galilee (Mark 1:14) and made it impossible for John to keep track of Jesus' activity. But what he learned of Jesus' doings from his prison did not correspond to Israel's end-times expectations. The arrival of the messianic Kingdom seemed to require a fundamental rearrangement of this world's structures and relationships. Whether the last days could begin in the middle of history itself, without a total upheaval of that history, was the question that all of Israel asked Jesus: "Where is the promise of His coming?... Everything has remained as it was since the beginning of creation." (2 Pet 3:4)
Jesus' reply employed words borrowed from the Old Covenant itself: "the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the good news is proclaimed to the poor." (Is. 35:5; 26:19; 61:1). What Isaiah perhaps had intended as a series of joyous images for the dawn of salvation now become literal reality in Jesus' work. He not only had healed the deaf, blind, lame and lepers but also, just before John's question had arrived, had raised the boy from Naim from the dead (Luke 7:11-17). The metaphorical and eschatological had come to pass in history, including the eschatological resurrection of the dead, which was now occurring within time. All this seemed so modest, so powerless to overturn the world's structures. Yet the phrase "the good news is proclaimed to the poor" was also an Old Testament phrase (Is. 61:1), and it precisely the poor whom Jesus lists first among those who are blessed -- yet they are blessed precisely as the poor, not, as the Old Covenant normally assumed, as having been snatched out of their poverty ("he raises the weak from the dust, and the poor from the ash heap" [Ps. 113:7]). The great transformation of which the Magnificat also sings does not take place sociologically -- the "lowly maid" is not changed into a reigning queen.
The Old Covenant simply must bring its expectation into line with the decree of God that was revealed clearly enough in Isaiah 61:1-2: the Spirit of the Lord has sent the messiah to "proclaim good tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And if "liberty" is promised "to the captives" and "redemption to those in shackles," this apparently means something beyond the sort of political development hoped for by the Baptist suffering in his prison. Social and political developments may well follow from the true eschatological event that Jesus constituted, but the order he established dare not be reversed. Had not Yahweh throughout the course of history repeatedly disappointed, indeed, deliberately crushed, his people's earthly expectations and longings?
When Jesus concludes with the warning "happy is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6), he addresses the entire Old Covenant in his direct answer to the imprisoned John the Baptist, who needs to tear down some of his "ideological superstructures" in order to uncover the simple meaning of the divine promises. What a withdrawal process Israel has already begun: the Ark of the Covenant taken captive only to be destroyed by fire later along with the entire temple; not even one stone of the rebuilt temple is left standing upon another; the entire holy city lying in rubble. Should not Christians reflect on this object lesson and ask themselves whether the Crusades, the forcible conversion of the Saxons under Charlemagne, the cathedrals, and the Basilica of St. Peter, can be a basis for, even a mere symbol of, "proclaiming the good news to the captives"?
Lately I have been richly rewarded by starting off each day reading from his posthumously-collected series of scriptural reflections, You Have Words of Eternal Life. Each short reflection takes a brief phrase directly from scripture -- such as the title phrase -- and goes off from it in fascinating, and very often quite unexpected, directions. These were among the last writings he was working on just before he died, and the sense you get as you read them is of a wise old theologian/priest sharing with you the various and valuable fruits of a lifetime of thinking, praying and studying the scriptures. This experience, I am convinced, is the reason that each meditation seems to provide me with an angle on a familiar passage of scripture I had never considered before. The collection is a wonderful blessing from one of the most important and gifted theologians of our time.
I read this one only a few days ago, but then realized it would work very well as a meditation before/during the Christmas season (which, according to the Church, we are still very much in the midst of, even though the stores and homes have all packed away their decorations and lights for another year!). I thought it would be worth sharing on this blog, and as I do so, I wish everyone a blessed New Year -- one that brings with it new and exciting encounters with Jesus, our Emmanuel ("God with us").
*******
"Are You the One Who is to Come?"
The question that a captive John the Baptist sends to Jesus by way of two of his disciples (Matt. 11:3) is the all-encompassing question of the Old Covenant directed at the New. Drawing together all of Israel's longing, John had expected the eschatological Judge who would also be Israel's Savior. He spent only a short time in Jesus' company (John 4:1-2) -- his arrest caused Jesus to return to Galilee (Mark 1:14) and made it impossible for John to keep track of Jesus' activity. But what he learned of Jesus' doings from his prison did not correspond to Israel's end-times expectations. The arrival of the messianic Kingdom seemed to require a fundamental rearrangement of this world's structures and relationships. Whether the last days could begin in the middle of history itself, without a total upheaval of that history, was the question that all of Israel asked Jesus: "Where is the promise of His coming?... Everything has remained as it was since the beginning of creation." (2 Pet 3:4)
Jesus' reply employed words borrowed from the Old Covenant itself: "the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the good news is proclaimed to the poor." (Is. 35:5; 26:19; 61:1). What Isaiah perhaps had intended as a series of joyous images for the dawn of salvation now become literal reality in Jesus' work. He not only had healed the deaf, blind, lame and lepers but also, just before John's question had arrived, had raised the boy from Naim from the dead (Luke 7:11-17). The metaphorical and eschatological had come to pass in history, including the eschatological resurrection of the dead, which was now occurring within time. All this seemed so modest, so powerless to overturn the world's structures. Yet the phrase "the good news is proclaimed to the poor" was also an Old Testament phrase (Is. 61:1), and it precisely the poor whom Jesus lists first among those who are blessed -- yet they are blessed precisely as the poor, not, as the Old Covenant normally assumed, as having been snatched out of their poverty ("he raises the weak from the dust, and the poor from the ash heap" [Ps. 113:7]). The great transformation of which the Magnificat also sings does not take place sociologically -- the "lowly maid" is not changed into a reigning queen.
The Old Covenant simply must bring its expectation into line with the decree of God that was revealed clearly enough in Isaiah 61:1-2: the Spirit of the Lord has sent the messiah to "proclaim good tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And if "liberty" is promised "to the captives" and "redemption to those in shackles," this apparently means something beyond the sort of political development hoped for by the Baptist suffering in his prison. Social and political developments may well follow from the true eschatological event that Jesus constituted, but the order he established dare not be reversed. Had not Yahweh throughout the course of history repeatedly disappointed, indeed, deliberately crushed, his people's earthly expectations and longings?
When Jesus concludes with the warning "happy is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6), he addresses the entire Old Covenant in his direct answer to the imprisoned John the Baptist, who needs to tear down some of his "ideological superstructures" in order to uncover the simple meaning of the divine promises. What a withdrawal process Israel has already begun: the Ark of the Covenant taken captive only to be destroyed by fire later along with the entire temple; not even one stone of the rebuilt temple is left standing upon another; the entire holy city lying in rubble. Should not Christians reflect on this object lesson and ask themselves whether the Crusades, the forcible conversion of the Saxons under Charlemagne, the cathedrals, and the Basilica of St. Peter, can be a basis for, even a mere symbol of, "proclaiming the good news to the captives"?
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
On Writing Short Stories: A Kind of Meditation
Not too long ago (July ’07) I posted on this blog a rant, more or less, decrying the current ‘state’ of the short story in America in a very limited and non-scholarly way. Shortly after that a piece ran in the New York Times Book section by Stephen King in which he provided his own assessment of the form, following on the heels of his stint as the editor of the Best American Short Stories series for 2007. (Read King’s take here if you’re interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html )
I based much (but not all) of my opinion on stories I read in the New Yorker throughout the year, and while I realize that this is only a very small portion of the short fiction published in literary magazines, that magazine is still more or less universally regarded as the gold standard for short fiction. At the time I couldn’t believe that what was showing up in the magazine represented the very best of the short story form. What I’ve read since July in the magazine certainly hasn’t changed my view. In fact, right now I am reading the ‘Winter Fiction Issue’ which features five original short stories, as opposed to the regular output of one per week. I’ve read four of the five stories selected in the issue so far, and even though they’re big names (Juanot Diaz, Anne Enright), the only one of them I liked at all so far was written by Raymond Carver in the early 1980s, reprinted in a different format than the published original. (The story is called ‘Beginners’ in this issue but was originally published in a much smaller version as ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’.) The three new stories I have read all seemed boring and pointless to me, although written well. Which is my general complaint with the contemporary short story: they’re well written and almost all of them leave me saying, ‘Who the hell cares??’ I have one story left to read in the issue, by Jhumpa Lahiri, but since she won the Pulitzer Prize for a story collection not too long ago, I am cautiously optimistic. We’ll see.
The reason why I bring this up is that whenever I consider my dissatisfaction with the current ‘state’ of the short story, my next thought is something to the effect of, while the form may be ill at the moment, I personally don’t appear to be the cure. In other words, I don’t seem to be much better. I’ve tried to write them for years, but they never seem to be very good. None of my stories have ever been published, and it’s not for lack of trying. Recently I was saying to a friend that I was 0-for-?? in terms of publishing short fiction, and that got me wondering how many stories I had ever attempted to send out for publication, which in turn made me wonder how many short stories I’ve actually written in my writing life. So I conducted a short experiment in my basement, sifting through all my old and new writing notebooks and files, attempting to determine how many stories I have authored. At first I thought “It must be close to 100.’ Not even close. As my list grew slowly, I could tell I was running out of material! Then I thought, ‘Maybe I’ve written 50 though.’ Nope. As it turns out, as best I can tell, I’ve written a total of 33 short stories. (I am only counting finished stories, meaning stories I wrote until they ended, as opposed to the large number I’ve tried and eventually abandoned.) This number includes a certain infamous tale I was once assigned to write for a high school English class concerning an angel that I, for some reason, still own a copy of, and that only Duke would recognize. It is one hell of a bad story, but I still managed to bring it to an end.
In fact, most of my short stories are rather unsatisfying to me, so I guess in my previous ‘rants’ I am proving the adage that those who can’t do become critics. I’ve written a few that I’m reasonably proud of, maybe two or three, but most of my 33 stories fall way short of the original ambition behind them. That seems true all the way up through the most recent story I finished called ‘In The Throes’, which I sent hopefully to three magazines that all promptly rejected it. Although in fairness I thought ‘Throes’ contained some of my best writing to date. Still, no one bought it, literally. So it turns out that I can recognize very well, I think, what I think ails other stories but can’t do a very good job of writing a good one myself. I guess this is nothing new. Yet I feel like I’m slowly improving all the time, even though each new story still seems to fall short. I often wonder when the one story I am writing will finally be ‘the one’ that busts through, but in seventeen years, that moment has still not come.
Now I find myself writing my 34th short story while my novel is on hiatus, owing to a lack of time and resources for the necessary research to continue (which I’d better fix here right quick!). And this one is coming along particularly painfully, especially since I don’t know much about what I am writing about, which is grief – or, it may be more correct to say, that shell-shocked state of mind a person enters into before they are able to grieve. This time around the writing is coming very slowly, almost a paragraph at a sitting, which probably has a lot to do with how little time I get to actually work on it, but it also says something to me about the arduousness of the job. Particularly with short stories I find the writing to be very difficult. To me the only way to write short stories is on an instinctive basis – meaning you start the story just based on your hunch of where the thing should begin, you end it much the same way, you break off certain segments based on your gut, and you write different sequences of it on the basis of what feels right for the story. More than with a longer fiction work (which of course I am no expert at either), to me writing stories feels like a blind operation – I can rarely see exactly where I’m going and I don’t know what obstacles I’m going to hit, even if I know how I want the story to end.
In my new story, for example, I know how I want the story to end ahead of time, but I don’t really know what it ‘means’ or why I think it needs to end there. I just feel like it should. Don’t ask for interpretations. I also included an early dream sequence that has nothing to do with the actual events of the story and seems awfully cryptic and strange, and yet the images in the dream I invented to me are powerful ones and need to stay even though I can’t explain why or what ‘purpose’ the sequence serves. Also, as I alluded to before, I am writing about someone going through something I haven’t personally had much experience with so I don’t really know how the hell the guy in the story would feel or what he would do in the situation. So what gives me the thought that this is a story I can write? I can’t answer that, but I have been writing stories at least for long enough to know that when an idea grips me and I feel like I have something to say about it, I need to try it, and it doesn’t matter whether I am doing so with the authority of experience or not. My job is to tell the story and to do that you have to just put yourself in the mind of someone else, which is inherently impossible, so in that sense there’s no less reason for me to try it than any of the great story writers who have done so with so much more success before me.
Thus, these days I get up and I grind out what I can of the new story and I don’t worry too much about whether or not it will get there. I just try to write the next sentence. When the narrative arc is curving around to the finish, I will know – that much I do have experience with. The process is so nebulous, so organic that it is hard to know what drives one to do it or what purpose it serves. Yet the instinct is there and it is powerful, and with me it only grows with each new completed story or book review or essay, no matter how few people read it and hear whatever it was I was trying to say, no matter how little success it meets in terms of publication or readership or admiration from someone other than its author. There’s something I must want to say on the subject, and I will stick at it until I’ve said it. If nobody hears it it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a bizarre thing, but to me it also feels like a pure thing, a natural thing. God created natural things one and all, so if each story is a flame and my work is one big fire, God is the Source of the fire. So you might say that just as each individual story has its own author, the Source of the stories has its own Authority, and I am merely acting upon His edict.
I based much (but not all) of my opinion on stories I read in the New Yorker throughout the year, and while I realize that this is only a very small portion of the short fiction published in literary magazines, that magazine is still more or less universally regarded as the gold standard for short fiction. At the time I couldn’t believe that what was showing up in the magazine represented the very best of the short story form. What I’ve read since July in the magazine certainly hasn’t changed my view. In fact, right now I am reading the ‘Winter Fiction Issue’ which features five original short stories, as opposed to the regular output of one per week. I’ve read four of the five stories selected in the issue so far, and even though they’re big names (Juanot Diaz, Anne Enright), the only one of them I liked at all so far was written by Raymond Carver in the early 1980s, reprinted in a different format than the published original. (The story is called ‘Beginners’ in this issue but was originally published in a much smaller version as ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’.) The three new stories I have read all seemed boring and pointless to me, although written well. Which is my general complaint with the contemporary short story: they’re well written and almost all of them leave me saying, ‘Who the hell cares??’ I have one story left to read in the issue, by Jhumpa Lahiri, but since she won the Pulitzer Prize for a story collection not too long ago, I am cautiously optimistic. We’ll see.
The reason why I bring this up is that whenever I consider my dissatisfaction with the current ‘state’ of the short story, my next thought is something to the effect of, while the form may be ill at the moment, I personally don’t appear to be the cure. In other words, I don’t seem to be much better. I’ve tried to write them for years, but they never seem to be very good. None of my stories have ever been published, and it’s not for lack of trying. Recently I was saying to a friend that I was 0-for-?? in terms of publishing short fiction, and that got me wondering how many stories I had ever attempted to send out for publication, which in turn made me wonder how many short stories I’ve actually written in my writing life. So I conducted a short experiment in my basement, sifting through all my old and new writing notebooks and files, attempting to determine how many stories I have authored. At first I thought “It must be close to 100.’ Not even close. As my list grew slowly, I could tell I was running out of material! Then I thought, ‘Maybe I’ve written 50 though.’ Nope. As it turns out, as best I can tell, I’ve written a total of 33 short stories. (I am only counting finished stories, meaning stories I wrote until they ended, as opposed to the large number I’ve tried and eventually abandoned.) This number includes a certain infamous tale I was once assigned to write for a high school English class concerning an angel that I, for some reason, still own a copy of, and that only Duke would recognize. It is one hell of a bad story, but I still managed to bring it to an end.
In fact, most of my short stories are rather unsatisfying to me, so I guess in my previous ‘rants’ I am proving the adage that those who can’t do become critics. I’ve written a few that I’m reasonably proud of, maybe two or three, but most of my 33 stories fall way short of the original ambition behind them. That seems true all the way up through the most recent story I finished called ‘In The Throes’, which I sent hopefully to three magazines that all promptly rejected it. Although in fairness I thought ‘Throes’ contained some of my best writing to date. Still, no one bought it, literally. So it turns out that I can recognize very well, I think, what I think ails other stories but can’t do a very good job of writing a good one myself. I guess this is nothing new. Yet I feel like I’m slowly improving all the time, even though each new story still seems to fall short. I often wonder when the one story I am writing will finally be ‘the one’ that busts through, but in seventeen years, that moment has still not come.
Now I find myself writing my 34th short story while my novel is on hiatus, owing to a lack of time and resources for the necessary research to continue (which I’d better fix here right quick!). And this one is coming along particularly painfully, especially since I don’t know much about what I am writing about, which is grief – or, it may be more correct to say, that shell-shocked state of mind a person enters into before they are able to grieve. This time around the writing is coming very slowly, almost a paragraph at a sitting, which probably has a lot to do with how little time I get to actually work on it, but it also says something to me about the arduousness of the job. Particularly with short stories I find the writing to be very difficult. To me the only way to write short stories is on an instinctive basis – meaning you start the story just based on your hunch of where the thing should begin, you end it much the same way, you break off certain segments based on your gut, and you write different sequences of it on the basis of what feels right for the story. More than with a longer fiction work (which of course I am no expert at either), to me writing stories feels like a blind operation – I can rarely see exactly where I’m going and I don’t know what obstacles I’m going to hit, even if I know how I want the story to end.
In my new story, for example, I know how I want the story to end ahead of time, but I don’t really know what it ‘means’ or why I think it needs to end there. I just feel like it should. Don’t ask for interpretations. I also included an early dream sequence that has nothing to do with the actual events of the story and seems awfully cryptic and strange, and yet the images in the dream I invented to me are powerful ones and need to stay even though I can’t explain why or what ‘purpose’ the sequence serves. Also, as I alluded to before, I am writing about someone going through something I haven’t personally had much experience with so I don’t really know how the hell the guy in the story would feel or what he would do in the situation. So what gives me the thought that this is a story I can write? I can’t answer that, but I have been writing stories at least for long enough to know that when an idea grips me and I feel like I have something to say about it, I need to try it, and it doesn’t matter whether I am doing so with the authority of experience or not. My job is to tell the story and to do that you have to just put yourself in the mind of someone else, which is inherently impossible, so in that sense there’s no less reason for me to try it than any of the great story writers who have done so with so much more success before me.
Thus, these days I get up and I grind out what I can of the new story and I don’t worry too much about whether or not it will get there. I just try to write the next sentence. When the narrative arc is curving around to the finish, I will know – that much I do have experience with. The process is so nebulous, so organic that it is hard to know what drives one to do it or what purpose it serves. Yet the instinct is there and it is powerful, and with me it only grows with each new completed story or book review or essay, no matter how few people read it and hear whatever it was I was trying to say, no matter how little success it meets in terms of publication or readership or admiration from someone other than its author. There’s something I must want to say on the subject, and I will stick at it until I’ve said it. If nobody hears it it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a bizarre thing, but to me it also feels like a pure thing, a natural thing. God created natural things one and all, so if each story is a flame and my work is one big fire, God is the Source of the fire. So you might say that just as each individual story has its own author, the Source of the stories has its own Authority, and I am merely acting upon His edict.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 41
The List is Life
The above has nothing to do with the novel I am writing, but that's kind of on hiatus at the moment (see below). Since I know Duke's the only one who's gonna read this anyway, I thought I would make a few quick overdue observations about his Top Ten Books list this year. Notice how drastically different it is from mine, which I always find very interesting about these lists when we post them annually. They really reflect the differences in our reading, while at the same time many of the books on his list could have been books I would have enjoyed as much or nearly as much, and vice versa. I lean heavily on fiction titles, always have; but Duke reads more widely than I do, in poetry, general nonfiction, and religion, so his list frequently reflects those interests. I am interested to some extent in all of those things, and probably should read more of them, but I don't always seem to prioritize them over the fiction I am (at times) irrepressibly interested in checking out. There's one exception for me, which is my annual Spiritual Reading challenge during the 40-day period of Lent, when I generally try to read exclusively religious titles. It's my way of taking time to focus on those concepts and realities, which I think is helpful in some ways. But anyway, I just wanted to comment on how much I can appreciate the diversity of Duke's list, with a poetry collection, two short-story volumes, a 19th century classic, a spiritual classic, a pair of memoirs, a play, and three contemporary novels. Now THAT'S a diverse best-of list. Furthermore, I defy anyone who sees this to find a single other person who, if they would even make a best books of the year list, include a Papal encyclical on that list. Only a Duke Altum list would contain that, which is why they're so enjoyable to check out every year.
Holiday Hiatus
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make any progress on starting into Chapter V of my novel. After finishing the draft of Chapter IV back on November 6, I thought for sure I would be able to start Chapter V before the end of 2007, but it hasn't happened. I guess you can chalk that up to a lot of things, not the least of which is the holiday madness around Christmas and visiting relatives, which makes getting anything done difficult. But the real problem is that I have a concept of how I want to open up the chapter but don't have a sufficient amount of research information to start writing, and I have not had time to go to a library and try to track down what I need. Unfortunately what I do need is not going to be easy to find so it may take some time. Time to spend at a library doing research is not something I can usually attain unless I do a certain amount of prior planning and make arrangements. Not so easy during this time of year. Not to mention the fact that I'm not really sure how to go about getting what I need in the first place. So I guess it's natural that I might fall behind this time of year but I don't much like it, it gives me concerns about whether I will be able to sustain overall momentum on the project. It occurs to me that I have had concerns of a similar nature before during the writing of this novel, and have been able to overcome them. Overcoming past obstacles doesn't guarantee you will be able to overcome future ones, but it does give you some confidence that you might not have had before. At least I do have a general idea of what I want to do in the chapter, with plenty of open spaces to fill in as well, but filling in those spaces is the least of my concerns, because I know that happens when you get into the actual writing. What I need to worry about for now is finding time to gather information and actually get started on the chapter. But I think it will still be a little while before I can get to it; we're still in the holiday season. In the meantime, I get really antsy if i am not writing at all, so I have taken a couple steps to try to stay active in the middle of this break in the novel action. Hope it doesn't derail me permanently......
Two New Writings
As I mentioned, even when I am having problems in the novel, I don't like to be completely inert when it comes to writing. I like to keep working. This was borne out last year when I was having so much trouble writing Chapter III in the middle of my family's house hunting and move to Pennsylvania. I was really stuck in the middle of the chapter, but I wanted to keep working, so I took some time to write a short story (the only one I wrote last year) called "In the Throes". Now, during this hiatus, I wanted to do the same thing, so the first thing I took on was a short essay on a topic I've been meaning to write on for about 4-5 years, and it's a departure for me. The subject is the Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, and the essay is called "Sling It: Brett Favre as Literary Inspiration". As I said, I wanted to write a piece on Favre for some time, but I could never find the angle on it that I wanted. I even started several different Favre-related essays but they all fizzled out. This time I ran into a contest run by a magazine called Sport Literate that asked for "Football Essays" and hopes to run a winning piece by the start of the '08 football season. Since the magazine seemed to aspire to bridge the gap between literature and sports (who knew that gap needed to be bridged?), I thought I would take a literary sort of angle on my being a fan of Favre, and the essay is what I came up with. I think it turned out pretty well and that I said most of what I have been wanting to say in writing about this great player, and I plan to ship it in for the contest after this football season is over (how far Favre goes in the post-season may have some bearing on the essay!). Stay tuned here to see what happens with the piece. The odds are long but that never stopped a champion like Favre so I don't see why it should stop me.
The second piece during this break is the one I am working on now - a new short story tentatively titled "I Will Be Out of the Office". I just started working on it and I am not sure if it's going to fly, but we'll see. I have never had any publishing success with stories so I always go into a new story hoping that 'this will be the one'. At the same time I enter into a new story with some trepidation because I don't feel very adept at the form, never seem to be able to keep my stories as short as they probably need to be (I need a kind of Gordon Lish, not that I'm any Ray Carver), and usually feel that they don't quite reach my original ambition. These are the same qualities that keep me trying on stories, though; I feel like I want to stick at it until I get one right. I don't want to say too much now about the one I am working on, because I don't know if it will make it past the sputtering stage, but I can reveal that it is about grief, something that I don't have a lot of first hand experience with. This, in an odd way, is why I wanted to write the story now, since it relates to losing a direct family member. I haven't lost one myself, aside from a grandparent, and in a strange way I kind of feel like for me to write a story on the subject after this inevitably occurs would just be a way for me to channel my own grief, and would end up being a kind of memoir-disguised-as-a-story. It would be therapy, and I don't want to write this particular story that way. Doing it now for me is an exercise in trying to enter into the emotions of someone else, which I think is a valuable enterprise. I can't rely on my own experience because I haven't had it yet. So the literary challenge for me is to make it a believable story in spite of the fact that I haven't experienced it myself yet. That to me is what a fiction writer has to be able to do and I may very well bungle it, but the challenge itself is a motivator to me. We'll see if I get this one done.
The above has nothing to do with the novel I am writing, but that's kind of on hiatus at the moment (see below). Since I know Duke's the only one who's gonna read this anyway, I thought I would make a few quick overdue observations about his Top Ten Books list this year. Notice how drastically different it is from mine, which I always find very interesting about these lists when we post them annually. They really reflect the differences in our reading, while at the same time many of the books on his list could have been books I would have enjoyed as much or nearly as much, and vice versa. I lean heavily on fiction titles, always have; but Duke reads more widely than I do, in poetry, general nonfiction, and religion, so his list frequently reflects those interests. I am interested to some extent in all of those things, and probably should read more of them, but I don't always seem to prioritize them over the fiction I am (at times) irrepressibly interested in checking out. There's one exception for me, which is my annual Spiritual Reading challenge during the 40-day period of Lent, when I generally try to read exclusively religious titles. It's my way of taking time to focus on those concepts and realities, which I think is helpful in some ways. But anyway, I just wanted to comment on how much I can appreciate the diversity of Duke's list, with a poetry collection, two short-story volumes, a 19th century classic, a spiritual classic, a pair of memoirs, a play, and three contemporary novels. Now THAT'S a diverse best-of list. Furthermore, I defy anyone who sees this to find a single other person who, if they would even make a best books of the year list, include a Papal encyclical on that list. Only a Duke Altum list would contain that, which is why they're so enjoyable to check out every year.
Holiday Hiatus
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make any progress on starting into Chapter V of my novel. After finishing the draft of Chapter IV back on November 6, I thought for sure I would be able to start Chapter V before the end of 2007, but it hasn't happened. I guess you can chalk that up to a lot of things, not the least of which is the holiday madness around Christmas and visiting relatives, which makes getting anything done difficult. But the real problem is that I have a concept of how I want to open up the chapter but don't have a sufficient amount of research information to start writing, and I have not had time to go to a library and try to track down what I need. Unfortunately what I do need is not going to be easy to find so it may take some time. Time to spend at a library doing research is not something I can usually attain unless I do a certain amount of prior planning and make arrangements. Not so easy during this time of year. Not to mention the fact that I'm not really sure how to go about getting what I need in the first place. So I guess it's natural that I might fall behind this time of year but I don't much like it, it gives me concerns about whether I will be able to sustain overall momentum on the project. It occurs to me that I have had concerns of a similar nature before during the writing of this novel, and have been able to overcome them. Overcoming past obstacles doesn't guarantee you will be able to overcome future ones, but it does give you some confidence that you might not have had before. At least I do have a general idea of what I want to do in the chapter, with plenty of open spaces to fill in as well, but filling in those spaces is the least of my concerns, because I know that happens when you get into the actual writing. What I need to worry about for now is finding time to gather information and actually get started on the chapter. But I think it will still be a little while before I can get to it; we're still in the holiday season. In the meantime, I get really antsy if i am not writing at all, so I have taken a couple steps to try to stay active in the middle of this break in the novel action. Hope it doesn't derail me permanently......
Two New Writings
As I mentioned, even when I am having problems in the novel, I don't like to be completely inert when it comes to writing. I like to keep working. This was borne out last year when I was having so much trouble writing Chapter III in the middle of my family's house hunting and move to Pennsylvania. I was really stuck in the middle of the chapter, but I wanted to keep working, so I took some time to write a short story (the only one I wrote last year) called "In the Throes". Now, during this hiatus, I wanted to do the same thing, so the first thing I took on was a short essay on a topic I've been meaning to write on for about 4-5 years, and it's a departure for me. The subject is the Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, and the essay is called "Sling It: Brett Favre as Literary Inspiration". As I said, I wanted to write a piece on Favre for some time, but I could never find the angle on it that I wanted. I even started several different Favre-related essays but they all fizzled out. This time I ran into a contest run by a magazine called Sport Literate that asked for "Football Essays" and hopes to run a winning piece by the start of the '08 football season. Since the magazine seemed to aspire to bridge the gap between literature and sports (who knew that gap needed to be bridged?), I thought I would take a literary sort of angle on my being a fan of Favre, and the essay is what I came up with. I think it turned out pretty well and that I said most of what I have been wanting to say in writing about this great player, and I plan to ship it in for the contest after this football season is over (how far Favre goes in the post-season may have some bearing on the essay!). Stay tuned here to see what happens with the piece. The odds are long but that never stopped a champion like Favre so I don't see why it should stop me.
The second piece during this break is the one I am working on now - a new short story tentatively titled "I Will Be Out of the Office". I just started working on it and I am not sure if it's going to fly, but we'll see. I have never had any publishing success with stories so I always go into a new story hoping that 'this will be the one'. At the same time I enter into a new story with some trepidation because I don't feel very adept at the form, never seem to be able to keep my stories as short as they probably need to be (I need a kind of Gordon Lish, not that I'm any Ray Carver), and usually feel that they don't quite reach my original ambition. These are the same qualities that keep me trying on stories, though; I feel like I want to stick at it until I get one right. I don't want to say too much now about the one I am working on, because I don't know if it will make it past the sputtering stage, but I can reveal that it is about grief, something that I don't have a lot of first hand experience with. This, in an odd way, is why I wanted to write the story now, since it relates to losing a direct family member. I haven't lost one myself, aside from a grandparent, and in a strange way I kind of feel like for me to write a story on the subject after this inevitably occurs would just be a way for me to channel my own grief, and would end up being a kind of memoir-disguised-as-a-story. It would be therapy, and I don't want to write this particular story that way. Doing it now for me is an exercise in trying to enter into the emotions of someone else, which I think is a valuable enterprise. I can't rely on my own experience because I haven't had it yet. So the literary challenge for me is to make it a believable story in spite of the fact that I haven't experienced it myself yet. That to me is what a fiction writer has to be able to do and I may very well bungle it, but the challenge itself is a motivator to me. We'll see if I get this one done.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
DUKE ALTUM'S NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2007
Well, here we go again friends... another year has gone by (almost), and I have had the opportunity to read many great and interesting books. And some not so great. But here are the ten that have made the most lasting impact on me this year, in no particular order... and some honorable mentions thrown in as well. Enjoy!
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A Christmas Memory/One Christmas/The Thanksgiving Visitor, Truman Capote - The book in this list that was read the earliest (January 2007) has stuck with me ever since. Each of these exquisitely written memoir pieces is embued with enough innocence, poignancy and sheer beauty to break your heart.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy - So much has already been said about this one that it seems absurd to try and capture it in a smattering of cheap words... an absolutely riveting and deeply haunting tale of good and evil, the end of the world, and the love between a father and son. It's strange that a book so cold and seemingly devoid of hope can feel, by the time you get to end, so uplifting.
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Tobias Wolff - This debut collection of stories set mostly in the American Northwest examine the foibles, pitfalls and consequences of human infidelities, both marital and otherwise. But they are written with enough originality, attention to detail, human insight and razor-sharp wit to remind of writers as good as O'Connor and Carver.
Middlemarch, George Eliot - As argued in an earlier post on this blog (see Archives -> November 2007), Eliot's masterpiece of English provincial life is really a book about vocation, and the profound significance and impact seemingly inconsequential lives can have on other lives around them, and on the world as a whole.
The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis - The only re-read on this year's list, Lewis' brilliant attempt to answer one of the world's oldest questions -- "Why do we have to suffer?" -- is one of the most lucid, insightful, and ultimately helpful theodicies I've ever read. More than just a philosophical treatise, this book is a manual to help us to live in a profoundly fallen world, even while hoping and and preparing for a greater one. Somehow, it manages to challenge the intellect and rejuvenate the spirit at the same time.
Gould's Book of Fish, Richard Flanagan - By far the most original of all books I read this year (and quite possibly, ever), Flanagan's book-within-a-book conveys the horrors and wonders of a 19th-century Tasmanian penal colony through the strangest of devices: a catalogue of local fish, painted by a lonely prisoner with a colorful and violent past. In the end, this surreal and haunting tale is a powerful treatise about the nature, and the limits, of art -- and the evils men are capable of inflicting upon one another.
A Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill - There's always one I'm fairly confident I read late in the previous year, but nevertheless want to single out for this year's list because I am unable to forget it. Long Day's Journey is definitely that one this year for me. This soul-shaking drama from the American Nobel Laureate has got to be one of the most devastating portraits of family failure ever written, in any age. Even the stage direction notes gave me goosebumps! Heartbreaking, but brilliant.
The Art of Living, John Gardner - A fascinating, eclectic collection of stories from one of America's most underappreciated writers who profoundly understood the human condition and used his art to wisely plumb its mysterious depths.
The Voice at 3:00 AM, Charles Simic - Has to be at least one poetry collection on the list. This extraordinary collection from 2007's U.S. Poet Laureate not only contains some of the most vivid and interesting poetry I've read in a long time, it also bears my favorite book title of the year. That voice is relaying some pretty strange, but fascinating, things to Simic when he can't sleep, apparently!
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Ron Hansen - Well, I missed the movie version (of course) this year, but I was very glad to have read the book! Hansen's meticulously crafted historical novel is a fascinating character study and morality tale that strips away all sentimentality and explores the reasons for, and the consequences of, the titular murder. Very few novels explore the aftermath of violence as effectively as this one.
BONUS ROUND: Titles that deserve mention and would have made the list if it were longer:
The Greatest American Short Stories (anthology)
Deus Caritas Est, the encyclical on Love by Pope Benedict XVI
A New Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell
The Short Stories of Jack London, Jack London
Billy Budd, Herman Melville
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Journal of a ‘Novel’-Entry 40
My Year In Review
It’s already December, and that means it’s time for year-end assessments, if we dare to make them. The fortieth entry of a journal tracking the progress of what may become my first novel, should it ever find its way to the light, is probably an appropriate place to consider how 2007 has panned out in terms of the novel’s development and in terms of my overall progress as a writer. If that sounds like a bore to whoever is reading this, all I can say is that while it is possible that a writer’s journal may one day end up being read by others, it’s not written with that possibility in mind, so you can’t really expect it to offer thrills.
My goal for 2007 was to write three more chapters of Only the Dying (working title). In the end, I was only able to complete two. If this is a kind of failure, it’s not one that I can’t recover from; it only means I fell one chapter short of the goal. Two chapters beats one or none. The main thing is that the novel in progress can be said to still be in progress – and trust me, given my track record with starting novels I was unable to finish, that’s a good thing.
In fact, I still think I am doing pretty well overall, with an attainable goal to complete the novel by age 40 (just turned 37), and having a Prologue and four chapters of the first draft complete (save additional revisions). I wrote 3 chapters (the Prologue is a chapter, more or less) in 2006 and added two this last year. I have always envisioned the novel to be made up of a Prologue, three parts, and some kind of epilogue or postscript, and my current plan is to write one more chapter (Chapter V), after which Part I of the novel will be finished. I project that the final novel will run somewhere between 12 and 15 chapters; by that measure, you might say I am 1/3 of the way there, and that’s not at all bad. I still have three years to complete the other 2/3 of the book, and although I doubt that will be easy, it seems achievable.
Length is a problem – for me it always is – but it can also be checked later on in the process. Through the end of Chapter IV my first draft is now running at around 260 pages, double-spaced. At this rate the draft will probably be somewhere around 1000 pages, and that is obviously too long, but I am sure a lot will change before this is all over! It’s always better to have too much written than too little, something I always say to the college students I tutor. Somebody once compared writing a novel to sculpture; you start with the raw cube or block of material, and you hack away at it until you get to the work of art inside. That’s what I would liken this process to, although I’m not sure if what’s inside my block is exactly Michelangelo’s Pieta. But you get the idea.
The good news is I have a general idea of how I want to kick off the next chapter (but I haven’t started it yet, I have some more research to do), and a vision of the overall concept and structure of the book, while somewhat nebulous, exists in my head. It’s been in development there for years, not months, so it’s not something I cooked up just last March and started scribbling at pell-mell. I know in broad terms what I am trying to accomplish, and I know from my experience that the creative process works if you put in the necessary effort. Many times now in the process of writing this longer story I have not had a clear idea of how to complete the section I was engrossed in, and every time it has come together eventually by sitting down and working at it. While most of the real grunt work of this novel still lies ahead – 2/3 of the first draft and all of the revision and editing labors –, it is critical for me to understand that I am capable of overcoming obstacles.
I had a tough time on Chapter III of the novel, which I started in December 2006 and didn’t finish until June of this year. But there was also a lot happening in my personal life during the same period – I started a new job, searched for and found my first house, moved my entire family, and worked on settling in a new state. In addition, I experienced the worst period of blockage I’ve had so far in this effort in the middle of this chapter, which might have happened even without all those ‘x’ factors. A few scenes didn’t feel right to me, and I am still not sure if they are. Nonetheless, I battled through it, finished the chapter, and had a somewhat easier time with Chapter IV. Chapter V is anybody’s guess, but if I’ve written I through IV, I guess there’s no real reason why I can’t write V. I’m proud that I made it through that tough chapter and that challenging period in my life in general and can say I am still writing the novel!
I’m also proud that I didn’t just sit idly by while I struggled on the book. During the first half of the year I also managed to publish twice – a period of torrid output in light of my few-and-far-between publication successes! In June my short essay on Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch appeared in Paste magazine, published throughout the United States and Europe. Later on, in the September/October issue of St. Austin Review, an appreciation I wrote of the novelist Ron Hansen’s work appeared, which I wrote in February, while I was blocked on Chapter III of the novel. This experience was gratifying in a number of ways: a) it had been a goal of mine to some day pay tribute to Hansen’s work, as he is one of my all-time literary heroes; b) this piece in particular was rejected three times but I still found a home for it; c) my name appeared on the cover of the magazine itself, only the second time it has happened to me; and d) most significantly, I was encouraged by many people to send the article to Ron Hansen, who teaches at Santa Clara University, and when I did, Hansen wrote me back a personal card to thank me for the tribute, which I will keep forever, in which he said I had ‘made his week’. It was a generous gesture from a great writer and a fine role model for young novelists, and of course I am grateful to Ron Hansen for making it.
Finally, in my never-ending quest to become a published fiction writer, I made another attempt this year to write a short story (also during my ‘blocked’ period), which I finished, the only short story I have produced in the last two years (after writing primarily stories between 2003 and 2005). The story was called “In The Throes”, and I think it turned out pretty well; it was ambitious both in terms of subject matter (it was written as a kind of response to the sexual abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church) and in character (my protagonist was a teenage girl). I thought it had some of my best prose writing to date. Nonetheless, it failed to find a home in print (it was rejected by two magazines), and after about fifteen years of trying, I still have yet to successfully publish a work of fiction. I won’t give up on that, however, I can assure you.
So, I think that 2007 was a literary year I can be somewhat proud of in spite of falling short of my goal of writing three chapters of the novel. For 2008, I will follow the old adage of “try, try again”, and set my goal for three more new chapters, so that hopefully sometime around December one year from now I will be saying I’ve made it through to the end of Chapter VII of the book (possibly ½ through?). It won’t be easy: this year brings yet another monumental life change in the form of my third child, due in May/June 2008, and I will still be working two jobs and trying to live up to all of my responsibilities at the same time.
When does a man find time to write in those circumstances? The answer is, whenever he can. It is obvious that with regard to the giant task of writing a first novel at my stage of life, there is still a long row to hoe, as it were; however, to quote an old hymn I managed to turn up in my research, “the Lord’s blessings are in the plow”.
It’s already December, and that means it’s time for year-end assessments, if we dare to make them. The fortieth entry of a journal tracking the progress of what may become my first novel, should it ever find its way to the light, is probably an appropriate place to consider how 2007 has panned out in terms of the novel’s development and in terms of my overall progress as a writer. If that sounds like a bore to whoever is reading this, all I can say is that while it is possible that a writer’s journal may one day end up being read by others, it’s not written with that possibility in mind, so you can’t really expect it to offer thrills.
My goal for 2007 was to write three more chapters of Only the Dying (working title). In the end, I was only able to complete two. If this is a kind of failure, it’s not one that I can’t recover from; it only means I fell one chapter short of the goal. Two chapters beats one or none. The main thing is that the novel in progress can be said to still be in progress – and trust me, given my track record with starting novels I was unable to finish, that’s a good thing.
In fact, I still think I am doing pretty well overall, with an attainable goal to complete the novel by age 40 (just turned 37), and having a Prologue and four chapters of the first draft complete (save additional revisions). I wrote 3 chapters (the Prologue is a chapter, more or less) in 2006 and added two this last year. I have always envisioned the novel to be made up of a Prologue, three parts, and some kind of epilogue or postscript, and my current plan is to write one more chapter (Chapter V), after which Part I of the novel will be finished. I project that the final novel will run somewhere between 12 and 15 chapters; by that measure, you might say I am 1/3 of the way there, and that’s not at all bad. I still have three years to complete the other 2/3 of the book, and although I doubt that will be easy, it seems achievable.
Length is a problem – for me it always is – but it can also be checked later on in the process. Through the end of Chapter IV my first draft is now running at around 260 pages, double-spaced. At this rate the draft will probably be somewhere around 1000 pages, and that is obviously too long, but I am sure a lot will change before this is all over! It’s always better to have too much written than too little, something I always say to the college students I tutor. Somebody once compared writing a novel to sculpture; you start with the raw cube or block of material, and you hack away at it until you get to the work of art inside. That’s what I would liken this process to, although I’m not sure if what’s inside my block is exactly Michelangelo’s Pieta. But you get the idea.
The good news is I have a general idea of how I want to kick off the next chapter (but I haven’t started it yet, I have some more research to do), and a vision of the overall concept and structure of the book, while somewhat nebulous, exists in my head. It’s been in development there for years, not months, so it’s not something I cooked up just last March and started scribbling at pell-mell. I know in broad terms what I am trying to accomplish, and I know from my experience that the creative process works if you put in the necessary effort. Many times now in the process of writing this longer story I have not had a clear idea of how to complete the section I was engrossed in, and every time it has come together eventually by sitting down and working at it. While most of the real grunt work of this novel still lies ahead – 2/3 of the first draft and all of the revision and editing labors –, it is critical for me to understand that I am capable of overcoming obstacles.
I had a tough time on Chapter III of the novel, which I started in December 2006 and didn’t finish until June of this year. But there was also a lot happening in my personal life during the same period – I started a new job, searched for and found my first house, moved my entire family, and worked on settling in a new state. In addition, I experienced the worst period of blockage I’ve had so far in this effort in the middle of this chapter, which might have happened even without all those ‘x’ factors. A few scenes didn’t feel right to me, and I am still not sure if they are. Nonetheless, I battled through it, finished the chapter, and had a somewhat easier time with Chapter IV. Chapter V is anybody’s guess, but if I’ve written I through IV, I guess there’s no real reason why I can’t write V. I’m proud that I made it through that tough chapter and that challenging period in my life in general and can say I am still writing the novel!
I’m also proud that I didn’t just sit idly by while I struggled on the book. During the first half of the year I also managed to publish twice – a period of torrid output in light of my few-and-far-between publication successes! In June my short essay on Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch appeared in Paste magazine, published throughout the United States and Europe. Later on, in the September/October issue of St. Austin Review, an appreciation I wrote of the novelist Ron Hansen’s work appeared, which I wrote in February, while I was blocked on Chapter III of the novel. This experience was gratifying in a number of ways: a) it had been a goal of mine to some day pay tribute to Hansen’s work, as he is one of my all-time literary heroes; b) this piece in particular was rejected three times but I still found a home for it; c) my name appeared on the cover of the magazine itself, only the second time it has happened to me; and d) most significantly, I was encouraged by many people to send the article to Ron Hansen, who teaches at Santa Clara University, and when I did, Hansen wrote me back a personal card to thank me for the tribute, which I will keep forever, in which he said I had ‘made his week’. It was a generous gesture from a great writer and a fine role model for young novelists, and of course I am grateful to Ron Hansen for making it.
Finally, in my never-ending quest to become a published fiction writer, I made another attempt this year to write a short story (also during my ‘blocked’ period), which I finished, the only short story I have produced in the last two years (after writing primarily stories between 2003 and 2005). The story was called “In The Throes”, and I think it turned out pretty well; it was ambitious both in terms of subject matter (it was written as a kind of response to the sexual abuse scandals that rocked the Catholic Church) and in character (my protagonist was a teenage girl). I thought it had some of my best prose writing to date. Nonetheless, it failed to find a home in print (it was rejected by two magazines), and after about fifteen years of trying, I still have yet to successfully publish a work of fiction. I won’t give up on that, however, I can assure you.
So, I think that 2007 was a literary year I can be somewhat proud of in spite of falling short of my goal of writing three chapters of the novel. For 2008, I will follow the old adage of “try, try again”, and set my goal for three more new chapters, so that hopefully sometime around December one year from now I will be saying I’ve made it through to the end of Chapter VII of the book (possibly ½ through?). It won’t be easy: this year brings yet another monumental life change in the form of my third child, due in May/June 2008, and I will still be working two jobs and trying to live up to all of my responsibilities at the same time.
When does a man find time to write in those circumstances? The answer is, whenever he can. It is obvious that with regard to the giant task of writing a first novel at my stage of life, there is still a long row to hoe, as it were; however, to quote an old hymn I managed to turn up in my research, “the Lord’s blessings are in the plow”.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Mutt Ploughman’s Best Books of 2007
A listing of my favorite books read this year with brief comment, listed in order of merit.
10. The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan. Brilliantly-executed, morbid thriller about a stripper mistaken for a terrorist makes a very powerful statement about where our leaders are taking us.
9. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, Meg Meeker, M.D. I feel forever indebted to Dr. Meg Meeker for this wonderful advice manual for raising girls – the most useful nonfiction book I have ever read.
8. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar. Any novel in which the publisher’s description includes the phrase ‘intellectual acrobatics’ will resist any synopsis that I can provide, but this absurdist classic is a memorable, challenging, and mind-expanding experience.
7. The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric. This is the ultimate novel of Bosnia/Herzegovina/Yugoslavia, centered on the symbolic largesse of a centuries-old stone bridge over the Drina River.
6. White Teeth, Zadie Smith. First novel from wunderkind Zadie Smith, a prodigious talent, this is a remarkable Dickensian novel built around two very different London families and written with wit, intelligence, and huge ambition.
5. Freddy’s Book, John Gardner. Fascinating novel by the wonderful, sorely missed novelist Gardner contains a book-within-a-book set in Medieval Sweden and telling the unsettling tale of a battle between a knight and the Devil.
4. Forty Stories, Anton Chekhov. The undisputed master of the modern short story offers the reader compassionate, intelligent tales about common folk with emotional resonance and unmistakeable artistic genuis.
3. Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard. Simply the best contemporary short story collection I’ve read in years; if you read one story collection this coming year, this should be it.
2. What is the Point of Being a Christian?, Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. This book stunned me – a wonderful, lucid, but highly readable attempt to answer this question, from a priest with compassion, intelligence, and a breadth of experience from travels he made around the world.
1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert. A near-perfect work of literature, hands down the best book I read this year, satisfies on all fronts.
10. The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan. Brilliantly-executed, morbid thriller about a stripper mistaken for a terrorist makes a very powerful statement about where our leaders are taking us.
9. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, Meg Meeker, M.D. I feel forever indebted to Dr. Meg Meeker for this wonderful advice manual for raising girls – the most useful nonfiction book I have ever read.
8. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar. Any novel in which the publisher’s description includes the phrase ‘intellectual acrobatics’ will resist any synopsis that I can provide, but this absurdist classic is a memorable, challenging, and mind-expanding experience.
7. The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric. This is the ultimate novel of Bosnia/Herzegovina/Yugoslavia, centered on the symbolic largesse of a centuries-old stone bridge over the Drina River.
6. White Teeth, Zadie Smith. First novel from wunderkind Zadie Smith, a prodigious talent, this is a remarkable Dickensian novel built around two very different London families and written with wit, intelligence, and huge ambition.
5. Freddy’s Book, John Gardner. Fascinating novel by the wonderful, sorely missed novelist Gardner contains a book-within-a-book set in Medieval Sweden and telling the unsettling tale of a battle between a knight and the Devil.
4. Forty Stories, Anton Chekhov. The undisputed master of the modern short story offers the reader compassionate, intelligent tales about common folk with emotional resonance and unmistakeable artistic genuis.
3. Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard. Simply the best contemporary short story collection I’ve read in years; if you read one story collection this coming year, this should be it.
2. What is the Point of Being a Christian?, Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. This book stunned me – a wonderful, lucid, but highly readable attempt to answer this question, from a priest with compassion, intelligence, and a breadth of experience from travels he made around the world.
1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert. A near-perfect work of literature, hands down the best book I read this year, satisfies on all fronts.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #59: Three by Simic
Welcome to the Theater of the Absurd on this gray Sunday after Thanksgiving!
Here are three very short poems from the man currently serving as Poet Laureate of the United States, Charles Simic. His recently published collection with what just might be my favorite title of the year, The Voice at 3:00 A.M., is on my current reading shelf and I am finding it to be wonderfully complex and inspiring.
As I hope these three will show, he is very gifted at creating strange but vivid images using just a few well-chosen words. I don't pretend to understand any of these, but something about the atmopshere and mood they bring to one's mind, considering how brief they are, is impressive to me. They remind of scenes from a Fellini film -- you don't pretend to know exactly what they mean, but they feel like dreams you can somehow relate to anyway. And like Fellini, Simic is celebrated as an artist of the surreal -- whatever that means!
I really appreciate the end of that last one, if only because it makes me laugh heartily and yet, for some reason which I don't fully grasp, feels like it carries some wisdom with it as well. Maybe one day I will understand its impact on me... but then, maybe not!?!
*******
Evening Chess
The Black Queen raised high
In my father's angry hand.
December
It snows
and still the derelicts
go
carrying sandwich boards --
one proclaiming
the end of the world
the other
the rates of a local barbershop.
Folk Song
Sausage-makers of History,
the bloody kind,
You all hail from a village
Where the dog barking at the moon
Is the only poet.
Here are three very short poems from the man currently serving as Poet Laureate of the United States, Charles Simic. His recently published collection with what just might be my favorite title of the year, The Voice at 3:00 A.M., is on my current reading shelf and I am finding it to be wonderfully complex and inspiring.
As I hope these three will show, he is very gifted at creating strange but vivid images using just a few well-chosen words. I don't pretend to understand any of these, but something about the atmopshere and mood they bring to one's mind, considering how brief they are, is impressive to me. They remind of scenes from a Fellini film -- you don't pretend to know exactly what they mean, but they feel like dreams you can somehow relate to anyway. And like Fellini, Simic is celebrated as an artist of the surreal -- whatever that means!
I really appreciate the end of that last one, if only because it makes me laugh heartily and yet, for some reason which I don't fully grasp, feels like it carries some wisdom with it as well. Maybe one day I will understand its impact on me... but then, maybe not!?!
*******
Evening Chess
The Black Queen raised high
In my father's angry hand.
December
It snows
and still the derelicts
go
carrying sandwich boards --
one proclaiming
the end of the world
the other
the rates of a local barbershop.
Folk Song
Sausage-makers of History,
the bloody kind,
You all hail from a village
Where the dog barking at the moon
Is the only poet.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Living Faithfully a Hidden Life: Thoughts on George Eliot's 'Middlemarch'
I have just finished the second of a projected three weighty, challenging classics of Western literature that I'd decided I would try to read this year, after repeated procrastinations and delays: George Eliot's Victorian-era epic of English provincial life and manners, Middlemarch. (The first one, reported on earlier on this blog, was Thomas Mann's philosophical novel The Magic Mountain, and the third, if I ever get to it, will be Fyodor Dostoevsky's monumental spiritual classic The Brothers Karamazov.) This was also the first installment of my aforementioned "British Literary Invasion," in which I attempt to fill in the embarrassing gaps in my literary education when it comes to British literature. Soon I will be moving on to the next installment in that series with one of Thomas Hardy's best-known novels, The Return of the Native.
But enough about other novels -- I'd like to share a few thoughts about the massive one I have just completed. This was my first encounter with George Eliot's work, although of course I have been hearing about her famous novels for as long as I can remember: acknowledged classics such as The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, as well as lesser known works like Daniel Deronda and Adam Bede. Several years ago I learned about the spiritual and moral import of her work through reading Dr. Robert Coles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist and literary critic who famously taught the works of the Western literary tradition to doctors and lawyers at the graduate level at Harvard. The focus of his courses for these graduate students was always on how literature teaches us critically important moral and spiritual lessons of life, and several times in his writing he refers to Middlemarch as a work that has much to say about (to swipe the title of a book I just finished) "the art of living." I made a note to myself that this was a classic I needed to get back to at some point. That 'point' happened to be the last few months -- yes, it took me that long to get through it, but with a family of five and a full-time job to juggle, you don't exactly have huge chunks of time to sit back and read at your leisure! If you're going to take on a book as long and complex as Middlemarch, you have to be resigned to the fact that you're going to be living with these characters, and this writer, in your head for a long time...
All that said, I am happy to report that although Middlemarch takes real effort to get through, it is well worth the time spent. One might well wonder what a Victorian-era novel about the life of the citizens of a provincial English country village -- in which no major events happen, no crimes or battles or strange incidents or accidents or riots -- could possibly have to say to adults living in 21st-century America during the age of instant information, postmodern confusion and the pervasiveness of pop culture. My answer, perhaps not surprisingly to anyone who has visited this blog before, is simply this: everything. One of the great glories of literature is firmly rooted in the fact that human nature, in its essence, does not change. When the external wrappings of time and place are stripped away, the core is revealed to be something we all hold in common. And though the physical, logistical and social constraints and conditions of Victorian-era life in rural England may be quite different than those we live with, the deep and profound questions these characters are contending with were ones I found to be quite familiar. See if you agree with me. Questions such as:
But enough about other novels -- I'd like to share a few thoughts about the massive one I have just completed. This was my first encounter with George Eliot's work, although of course I have been hearing about her famous novels for as long as I can remember: acknowledged classics such as The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, as well as lesser known works like Daniel Deronda and Adam Bede. Several years ago I learned about the spiritual and moral import of her work through reading Dr. Robert Coles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist and literary critic who famously taught the works of the Western literary tradition to doctors and lawyers at the graduate level at Harvard. The focus of his courses for these graduate students was always on how literature teaches us critically important moral and spiritual lessons of life, and several times in his writing he refers to Middlemarch as a work that has much to say about (to swipe the title of a book I just finished) "the art of living." I made a note to myself that this was a classic I needed to get back to at some point. That 'point' happened to be the last few months -- yes, it took me that long to get through it, but with a family of five and a full-time job to juggle, you don't exactly have huge chunks of time to sit back and read at your leisure! If you're going to take on a book as long and complex as Middlemarch, you have to be resigned to the fact that you're going to be living with these characters, and this writer, in your head for a long time...
All that said, I am happy to report that although Middlemarch takes real effort to get through, it is well worth the time spent. One might well wonder what a Victorian-era novel about the life of the citizens of a provincial English country village -- in which no major events happen, no crimes or battles or strange incidents or accidents or riots -- could possibly have to say to adults living in 21st-century America during the age of instant information, postmodern confusion and the pervasiveness of pop culture. My answer, perhaps not surprisingly to anyone who has visited this blog before, is simply this: everything. One of the great glories of literature is firmly rooted in the fact that human nature, in its essence, does not change. When the external wrappings of time and place are stripped away, the core is revealed to be something we all hold in common. And though the physical, logistical and social constraints and conditions of Victorian-era life in rural England may be quite different than those we live with, the deep and profound questions these characters are contending with were ones I found to be quite familiar. See if you agree with me. Questions such as:
- What is the best way to live respectfully with others in community, while at the same time remaining independent with one's own ideas and not being afraid to express them?
- What are one's obligations to those neighbors outside the boundaries of one's own family circle? What happens when one's perceived responsibilities to those less fortunate than you start to impinge on one's responsibilities at home?
- What does it mean to "work out (one's) salvation with fear and trembling" within the context of a marriage relationship?
- To what extent should one's own hopes and dreams be sacrificed or put on hold so that a spouse can pursue theirs?
- To what extent should financial concerns and stewardship guide one's everyday decisions?
Middlemarch is a book that deals with the realities of married life vs. the societal conventions and expectations husbands and wives have imposed on them, the struggle to maintain a healthy moral and spiritual relationship to the material goods and resources we need in order to live, and the challenges and blessings of living in community. Beyond (and including) all of this, however, I think it is a book about vocation. Eliot chooses to begin the book with a fascinating prologue, comparing her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, to Saint Teresa of Avila (!):
Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity . . . . With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness . . . . Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse . . . . Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long recognizable deed.
Which sounds bleak, I realize (though interesting)... but my point is that Eliot is concerned with taking this seemingly ordinary life and opening it up for us, like a flower, to show us that inside is a heart that's much more complex and ambitious than it would appear on the surface. This is, in point of fact, no ordinary life at all. As we observe Dorothea's courtship and marriage, and then the terrific emotional and spiritual struggles she and her husband go through to maintain a happy and healthy life together, we come to realize that this is the crucible within which Dorothea's soul must be tested in order to realize who she really is. We are all tested in our lives with daily battles that roil and rage under the surface of seemingly "normal" and conventional situations. The people you pass by, work with, and talk to on the phone could very easily be going through excruciating, or exhilarating, seasons in their lives that will have a profound impact on who they are and what they have been put on this earth to do. But what we do, and specifically what we do with, to and for others, can have an impact that goes well beyond what our limited minds can account for.
Eliot expresses this profound reality eloquently in the final, and strangely hopeful, sentence of this great and serious book:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
If the Novel is Olympus, Dickens is Zeus
Introducing Mutt Ploughman’s first ever Annual Non-Scholarly Charles Dickens Essay to Correspond with Dickensfest VI
It’s a nice thing to be able to commemorate here my annual Dickensfest reading event, in which I spend about 3-4 weeks making absolutely certain that I read at least one work by Charles Dickens every year. This year I am bringing to life a new feature of this annual event, a web-only, non-scholarly, appreciative essay on the work of this master of English literature. Because this is the first year that I have presented an essay in any ‘official’ way on the blog (in past years I have usually posted some thoughts about whatever I was reading for that year’s Dickensfest), my primary goal is to review the short history of this self-applied annual literary regimen and provide some brief comments on the works of Dickens that I have had the pleasure of reading thus far.
Although I am working to repair the damage, my relationship with the work of Charles Dickens is not what it could have been. I am the immature student of this master novelist who was dumb enough to blow off several critical early blocks of instruction (i.e., reading assignments in my high school years) only to have to play catch-up later on (the present) when the ‘exams’ hit me (trying to write my own stories and novels). If I had been a more forward-thinking teenager, with any insight whatsoever into what I really wanted to do in this life, I might be on the second round with Charles Dickens’ works by now. Instead, I literally ignored any assignment I had in high school which had anything to do with Charles Dickens’ writing. If memory serves, I was certainly assigned to read both Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in my freshman year of high school. This would be around 1983-4. I remember only trying to stay awake as my terrible high school English teacher, Miss Zelkin, waved her witch-like fingernails and talked in a monotone about Miss Havisham in her wedding dress and the wimpy (to my mind) Pip running around dirt-infested London of the 19th century. The only thing I retained about A Tale of Two Cities was the phrase “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times” and a vague image of French people licking the cobblestones where wine had spilled. I am sure too that I must have been assigned to read “A Christmas Carol” in high school but I know I never did, opting to watch the movie like most other students. Probably the one with the Muppets. (Which holds up over time, incidentally, with the great Michael Caine as Scrooge!)
Based on these forgettable experiences, and my own shortage of interest, I was positive that once I left those courses I was done with Charles Dickens forever, and I couldn’t have been happier. And that same attitude, more or less, remained in force, I am embarrassed to admit, until somewhere around the turn of the last century. That’s right, when I was almost thirty years old. I had discovered in college, finally, that I was interested in writing fiction, and henceforth in literature in general, but this was sometime around 1990, and it still required another 9 to 10 years of maturation (only word I can think to describe it) to understand that Dickens was canonical reading for anyone interested in writing fiction well. For some reason before then I was unable to muster up an interest in 19th century literature or in England, and I perceived Dickens’ novels as huge, boring monoliths that no one could possibly enjoy.
Finally, in the Spring of 1999, I had the first of three watershed experiences that would help me to see the light and start reading Dickens. By this time I was attending The New School in New York City as an MFA candidate in Creative Writing, because I wanted to write my own stories and novels, and had made many ill-fated attempts to get my ‘career’ started in both forms. At The New School’s MFA program we were required to attend literature seminars, one per semester, that were led by working writers. I took one such seminar under the novelist and journalist David Gates, who writes columns on books and music for Newsweek magazine, and has written two novels and a story collection that at that time was just about to come out. Both of his novels were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a dour, acerbic, Baby Boomer with an extremely dry sense of humor, but he knew what he was doing, and I admire his writing in both magazines and in fiction even today. All I want to say about him was that he talked repeatedly, I mean ad nauseam, about Dickens and Jane Austen, frequently referring to their works or stories about their lives. The sheer breadth of his understanding of those writers’ works and the importance they seemed to have to him began to work on me, and I began to reconsider reading them. I wouldn’t have touched either of those novelists with a ten foot pole before I took Gates’ course, and I feel like I owe him for that.
The second watershed event was my own brother (Duke) making the prescient and intelligent choice to buy me an awesome Modern Library edition of A Tale of Two Cities in celebration of our 30th birthday on November 7, 2000 (the same day George W. Bush was not yet elected President). This, obviously, was a choice that would pay off. You must give credit where it is due, and in this case it is Duke’s. It became the first Dickens novel I ever read, but technically it was not the first installment of Dickensfest, because I hadn’t come up with that concept yet.
After this, exactly seven years ago in fact, I traveled with a friend to London, England, for an off-season 4-day weekend stay. I took A Tale of Two Cities with me, for by now I was convinced I had to explore Dickens, but I didn’t feel too excited about it. I started reading it on the plane, and I was astonished at how much I was enjoying it. On that same day, we arrived in London early in the morning, and came to the third, and by far the most influential, of the three watershed experiences. The guy I went with was a fan of the theater, the really old-school kind, and he wanted to go on a tour. I thought that would be great for sight-seeing reasons, so I agreed to go on a “Charles Dickens Walking Tour” of London. I thought it had to have at least some intrinsic literary value (my own dim intelligence starting to glow feebly).
Here’s how it worked: we found a brochure which told us a location near the river Thames and a time to be there. It was around mid-afternoon; I’ll never forget it. We wandered down to the riverside to a chilly location by a newsstand and waited with a group of other tourists. From where we stood we could see the London Eye and this other hideous stadium monstrosity that they had built for the millennium celebrations, the name of which escapes my memory. We were early, so we just milled around in the cold breeze. Precisely at the required time, a tiny, frail-looking older woman in 19th century peasantry dress showed up out of nowhere, gathered the small group around, and launched into a very vivid, spirited acting performance in which she was a character from that era and was going to guide us to numerous important locations in the life and in the work of the great Charles Dickens. I knew from the way she pronounced his name that the tour was going to be unforgettable. She said it like she was the voice of England herself, and her pride was clear. She was a tremendous actress; her voice inflection and enthusiasm were colorful and uninhibited, and she seemed like one of those great English stage actors that you see in BBC productions and “Masterpiece Theatre”. She took off – her pace belied her ragged appearance – and we all rushed to keep up.
That small woman and the places she guided us to changed my mind about Charles Dickens forever. She took us all over the place, to the financial district, St. Paul’s Cathedral, numerous pubs, school halls, and, to my surprise and pleasure, many back-alleys, fogotten streets and stone passageways. She brought the world of Charles Dickens vividly to life. I remember visiting a stone alleyway Dickens used to pick pockets in as a boy; a huge legal ediface called a ‘chancery’ in which Dickens set many scenes from Bleak House; a bank that played heavily into A Tale of Two Cities, which pleased me since I had just read about the place; a blacking factory like the one Dickens worked in as a child; the actual site of The Olde Curiousity Shoppe, which is still in existence; the location of the fictional murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist; and many drinking establishments where various Dickens scenes had been set. It’s hard to describe how interesting I found the entire tour and how the entire Dickens universe exploded to life in my brain, once I actually set my eyes on those places. As we continued the tour, the evening fell, and I remember ducking under archways in the glow of ornate iron streetlamps, hearing church bells, and hauling open large oaken doors to pubs where inside fires glowed in the hearth and male voices roared in laughter and song. I knew on that tour that I had to dig in to Dickens for real, and this time I had to go all the way. I had to read his books – every one of them – and see why he was the undisputed master of the novel. Just to wander on streets that Charles Dickens himself walked late at night while unable to sleep, plotting out his complicated stories in his brain, was a galvanizing experience for me. I remember those places every single time I open a Dickens novel. I know what they look like; I know what they sound like.
From that whole week sprung the idea of Dickensfest, although it really didn’t take root until two years later, 2002. I had already read Cities, and at some point that year I decided that I was going to read one novel or book by Charles Dickens a year for the rest of my life. This is the essence of Dickensfest. I thought, Why not? I will want to read most of the novels again, and there are a ton to begin with, and if you toss in the shorter works, ghost stories, Christmas tales, and all of his journalism, you can read a book a year forever and never exhaust the well. And I don’t know another author whose work is more worthy of devoting this kind of time and effort. Many people consider Dickens the greatest novelist who ever wrote in English, and I tend to agree. His novels are large, brave, and thrilling; poignant and hilarious; sinister, brooding, and compassionate. He was an undisputed genius of plot and character development, and he had the courage to take on large, important social issues in the context of that most arduous of artistic pursuits: the writing of novels.
Since I began with my annual Dickensfest, I have read some of the most unforgettable novels of any era, including Our Mutual Friend (2002), Bleak House (2003), Dombey and Son (2004), Martin Chuzzlewit (2005), and Nicholas Nickleby (2006). This year’s selection is probably the most famous of them all, Great Expectations. From each book I have taken many favorite moments, but here I will list what I consider to be unforgettable from each story:
-the scene in Our Mutual Friend where the schoolteacher Bradley Headstone captures his mortal enemy Rogue Riderhood in chains and plunges them both into the Thames River to drown in a murder/suicide
-the brilliant, symbolic opening descriptions of a thick fog crawling over a sleeping London in Bleak House
-the gut-wrenching death of Paul Dombey’s six-year-old son in Dombey and Son
-the heart-pounding suspense of what might be the ultimate Dickens murder scene, a bludgeoning in the woods perpetrated by the evil Jonas Chuzzlewit in Martin Chuzzlewit
-the incredible thrashing the title character doles out to the abusive schoolteacher (with the awesome name) Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickelby
I’m hopeful that these moments will give anyone who might read this an incentive to enter this world if you haven’t already, and if you are a fan of literature and novels. It is a joy every year to come back to Dickens and discover a new novel of his that I haven’t yet read, thanks to my lack of foresight when I was a younger reader! I am looking forward to the fruitful years ahead where I will rediscover again and again Charles Dickens’ works, and deepen my appreciation of his artistic genius and his big-hearted compassion. Dickens always championed the average Joe and the virtues of humanity in the face of the false authority of power-hungry institutions and the reality of Evil in the world. He never forgot what we all have in common with one another, and he may have put this sentiment best by inserting those internationally famous words in the small mouth of Tiny Tim: “And may God bless us; every one.”
It’s a nice thing to be able to commemorate here my annual Dickensfest reading event, in which I spend about 3-4 weeks making absolutely certain that I read at least one work by Charles Dickens every year. This year I am bringing to life a new feature of this annual event, a web-only, non-scholarly, appreciative essay on the work of this master of English literature. Because this is the first year that I have presented an essay in any ‘official’ way on the blog (in past years I have usually posted some thoughts about whatever I was reading for that year’s Dickensfest), my primary goal is to review the short history of this self-applied annual literary regimen and provide some brief comments on the works of Dickens that I have had the pleasure of reading thus far.
Although I am working to repair the damage, my relationship with the work of Charles Dickens is not what it could have been. I am the immature student of this master novelist who was dumb enough to blow off several critical early blocks of instruction (i.e., reading assignments in my high school years) only to have to play catch-up later on (the present) when the ‘exams’ hit me (trying to write my own stories and novels). If I had been a more forward-thinking teenager, with any insight whatsoever into what I really wanted to do in this life, I might be on the second round with Charles Dickens’ works by now. Instead, I literally ignored any assignment I had in high school which had anything to do with Charles Dickens’ writing. If memory serves, I was certainly assigned to read both Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in my freshman year of high school. This would be around 1983-4. I remember only trying to stay awake as my terrible high school English teacher, Miss Zelkin, waved her witch-like fingernails and talked in a monotone about Miss Havisham in her wedding dress and the wimpy (to my mind) Pip running around dirt-infested London of the 19th century. The only thing I retained about A Tale of Two Cities was the phrase “it was the best of times; it was the worst of times” and a vague image of French people licking the cobblestones where wine had spilled. I am sure too that I must have been assigned to read “A Christmas Carol” in high school but I know I never did, opting to watch the movie like most other students. Probably the one with the Muppets. (Which holds up over time, incidentally, with the great Michael Caine as Scrooge!)
Based on these forgettable experiences, and my own shortage of interest, I was positive that once I left those courses I was done with Charles Dickens forever, and I couldn’t have been happier. And that same attitude, more or less, remained in force, I am embarrassed to admit, until somewhere around the turn of the last century. That’s right, when I was almost thirty years old. I had discovered in college, finally, that I was interested in writing fiction, and henceforth in literature in general, but this was sometime around 1990, and it still required another 9 to 10 years of maturation (only word I can think to describe it) to understand that Dickens was canonical reading for anyone interested in writing fiction well. For some reason before then I was unable to muster up an interest in 19th century literature or in England, and I perceived Dickens’ novels as huge, boring monoliths that no one could possibly enjoy.
Finally, in the Spring of 1999, I had the first of three watershed experiences that would help me to see the light and start reading Dickens. By this time I was attending The New School in New York City as an MFA candidate in Creative Writing, because I wanted to write my own stories and novels, and had made many ill-fated attempts to get my ‘career’ started in both forms. At The New School’s MFA program we were required to attend literature seminars, one per semester, that were led by working writers. I took one such seminar under the novelist and journalist David Gates, who writes columns on books and music for Newsweek magazine, and has written two novels and a story collection that at that time was just about to come out. Both of his novels were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a dour, acerbic, Baby Boomer with an extremely dry sense of humor, but he knew what he was doing, and I admire his writing in both magazines and in fiction even today. All I want to say about him was that he talked repeatedly, I mean ad nauseam, about Dickens and Jane Austen, frequently referring to their works or stories about their lives. The sheer breadth of his understanding of those writers’ works and the importance they seemed to have to him began to work on me, and I began to reconsider reading them. I wouldn’t have touched either of those novelists with a ten foot pole before I took Gates’ course, and I feel like I owe him for that.
The second watershed event was my own brother (Duke) making the prescient and intelligent choice to buy me an awesome Modern Library edition of A Tale of Two Cities in celebration of our 30th birthday on November 7, 2000 (the same day George W. Bush was not yet elected President). This, obviously, was a choice that would pay off. You must give credit where it is due, and in this case it is Duke’s. It became the first Dickens novel I ever read, but technically it was not the first installment of Dickensfest, because I hadn’t come up with that concept yet.
After this, exactly seven years ago in fact, I traveled with a friend to London, England, for an off-season 4-day weekend stay. I took A Tale of Two Cities with me, for by now I was convinced I had to explore Dickens, but I didn’t feel too excited about it. I started reading it on the plane, and I was astonished at how much I was enjoying it. On that same day, we arrived in London early in the morning, and came to the third, and by far the most influential, of the three watershed experiences. The guy I went with was a fan of the theater, the really old-school kind, and he wanted to go on a tour. I thought that would be great for sight-seeing reasons, so I agreed to go on a “Charles Dickens Walking Tour” of London. I thought it had to have at least some intrinsic literary value (my own dim intelligence starting to glow feebly).
Here’s how it worked: we found a brochure which told us a location near the river Thames and a time to be there. It was around mid-afternoon; I’ll never forget it. We wandered down to the riverside to a chilly location by a newsstand and waited with a group of other tourists. From where we stood we could see the London Eye and this other hideous stadium monstrosity that they had built for the millennium celebrations, the name of which escapes my memory. We were early, so we just milled around in the cold breeze. Precisely at the required time, a tiny, frail-looking older woman in 19th century peasantry dress showed up out of nowhere, gathered the small group around, and launched into a very vivid, spirited acting performance in which she was a character from that era and was going to guide us to numerous important locations in the life and in the work of the great Charles Dickens. I knew from the way she pronounced his name that the tour was going to be unforgettable. She said it like she was the voice of England herself, and her pride was clear. She was a tremendous actress; her voice inflection and enthusiasm were colorful and uninhibited, and she seemed like one of those great English stage actors that you see in BBC productions and “Masterpiece Theatre”. She took off – her pace belied her ragged appearance – and we all rushed to keep up.
That small woman and the places she guided us to changed my mind about Charles Dickens forever. She took us all over the place, to the financial district, St. Paul’s Cathedral, numerous pubs, school halls, and, to my surprise and pleasure, many back-alleys, fogotten streets and stone passageways. She brought the world of Charles Dickens vividly to life. I remember visiting a stone alleyway Dickens used to pick pockets in as a boy; a huge legal ediface called a ‘chancery’ in which Dickens set many scenes from Bleak House; a bank that played heavily into A Tale of Two Cities, which pleased me since I had just read about the place; a blacking factory like the one Dickens worked in as a child; the actual site of The Olde Curiousity Shoppe, which is still in existence; the location of the fictional murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist; and many drinking establishments where various Dickens scenes had been set. It’s hard to describe how interesting I found the entire tour and how the entire Dickens universe exploded to life in my brain, once I actually set my eyes on those places. As we continued the tour, the evening fell, and I remember ducking under archways in the glow of ornate iron streetlamps, hearing church bells, and hauling open large oaken doors to pubs where inside fires glowed in the hearth and male voices roared in laughter and song. I knew on that tour that I had to dig in to Dickens for real, and this time I had to go all the way. I had to read his books – every one of them – and see why he was the undisputed master of the novel. Just to wander on streets that Charles Dickens himself walked late at night while unable to sleep, plotting out his complicated stories in his brain, was a galvanizing experience for me. I remember those places every single time I open a Dickens novel. I know what they look like; I know what they sound like.
From that whole week sprung the idea of Dickensfest, although it really didn’t take root until two years later, 2002. I had already read Cities, and at some point that year I decided that I was going to read one novel or book by Charles Dickens a year for the rest of my life. This is the essence of Dickensfest. I thought, Why not? I will want to read most of the novels again, and there are a ton to begin with, and if you toss in the shorter works, ghost stories, Christmas tales, and all of his journalism, you can read a book a year forever and never exhaust the well. And I don’t know another author whose work is more worthy of devoting this kind of time and effort. Many people consider Dickens the greatest novelist who ever wrote in English, and I tend to agree. His novels are large, brave, and thrilling; poignant and hilarious; sinister, brooding, and compassionate. He was an undisputed genius of plot and character development, and he had the courage to take on large, important social issues in the context of that most arduous of artistic pursuits: the writing of novels.
Since I began with my annual Dickensfest, I have read some of the most unforgettable novels of any era, including Our Mutual Friend (2002), Bleak House (2003), Dombey and Son (2004), Martin Chuzzlewit (2005), and Nicholas Nickleby (2006). This year’s selection is probably the most famous of them all, Great Expectations. From each book I have taken many favorite moments, but here I will list what I consider to be unforgettable from each story:
-the scene in Our Mutual Friend where the schoolteacher Bradley Headstone captures his mortal enemy Rogue Riderhood in chains and plunges them both into the Thames River to drown in a murder/suicide
-the brilliant, symbolic opening descriptions of a thick fog crawling over a sleeping London in Bleak House
-the gut-wrenching death of Paul Dombey’s six-year-old son in Dombey and Son
-the heart-pounding suspense of what might be the ultimate Dickens murder scene, a bludgeoning in the woods perpetrated by the evil Jonas Chuzzlewit in Martin Chuzzlewit
-the incredible thrashing the title character doles out to the abusive schoolteacher (with the awesome name) Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickelby
I’m hopeful that these moments will give anyone who might read this an incentive to enter this world if you haven’t already, and if you are a fan of literature and novels. It is a joy every year to come back to Dickens and discover a new novel of his that I haven’t yet read, thanks to my lack of foresight when I was a younger reader! I am looking forward to the fruitful years ahead where I will rediscover again and again Charles Dickens’ works, and deepen my appreciation of his artistic genius and his big-hearted compassion. Dickens always championed the average Joe and the virtues of humanity in the face of the false authority of power-hungry institutions and the reality of Evil in the world. He never forgot what we all have in common with one another, and he may have put this sentiment best by inserting those internationally famous words in the small mouth of Tiny Tim: “And may God bless us; every one.”
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #58
It probably doesn't need to be said here that the American writer Raymond Carver is known for his short stories primarily, rather than for his poems... but nonetheless he did write quite a few of the latter, and took the challenge of it very seriously. His poems may not go down in history as technically brilliant (not that I'd be a good judge of that!), but they are certainly interesting and, in their better moments, quite powerful.
This one is very meaningful to me because I think it can apply equally well both to the spiritual as well as the intellectual/artistic life. Anyone interested in pursuing both matters of the heart (i.e. following one's passion to create art) and matters of the spirit (i.e. attempting to approach something like holiness) should be able to relate to his determination to learn from the "book of Nature" without distraction -- and his subsequent failure to keep such distractions at bay: "But, as usual, my thoughts began to wander." Man, I sure found myself nodding in agreement over that line... anyway, I find it an admirably honest and accurate depiction of a common interior struggle.
*******
This Morning
This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk -- determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong -- duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back i didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.
This one is very meaningful to me because I think it can apply equally well both to the spiritual as well as the intellectual/artistic life. Anyone interested in pursuing both matters of the heart (i.e. following one's passion to create art) and matters of the spirit (i.e. attempting to approach something like holiness) should be able to relate to his determination to learn from the "book of Nature" without distraction -- and his subsequent failure to keep such distractions at bay: "But, as usual, my thoughts began to wander." Man, I sure found myself nodding in agreement over that line... anyway, I find it an admirably honest and accurate depiction of a common interior struggle.
*******
This Morning
This morning was something. A little snow
lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear
blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,
as far as the eye could see.
Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went
for a walk -- determined not to return
until I took in what Nature had to offer.
I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.
Crossed a field strewn with rocks
where snow had drifted. Kept going
until I reached the bluff.
Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and
the gulls wheeling over the white beach
far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure
cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts
began to wander. I had to will
myself to see what I was seeing
and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what
mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,
for a minute or two!) For a minute or two
it crowded out the usual musings on
what was right, and what was wrong -- duty,
tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat
with my former wife. All the things
I hoped would go away this morning.
The stuff I live with every day. What
I've trampled on in order to stay alive.
But for a minute or two I did forget
myself and everything else. I know I did.
For when I turned back i didn't know
where I was. Until some birds rose up
from the gnarled trees. And flew
in the direction I needed to be going.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 39
One Milestone is Here Now, Another Approaches
This edition of the journal is being written on November 7, 2007, which happens to be my 37th birthday. Thirty-seven on the seventh, in the seventh year of this millennium. Is this a positive omen? We can hope so. I may end up posting this on a later date, but I'm writing it on November 7, so it is on the actual day I was born. For those paying attention, by the way, it's also the day my cohort on this blog, Duke, was born, since we're idential twins. So: happy birthday Duke! Nice to cross the line on another year with you.
Since this is ostensibly a journal that marks progress on my 'novel', tentatively titled Only the Dying, it is good to report here today that as of yesterday, or November 6, I finished writing the draft of Chapter IV, 'A Lawyer's Return, Life After Death'. For those keeping the stats (I like to pretend that I have a whole crew working on this project, when it's really just me that's responsible), I started writing the chapter on July 20 and finished on November 6, so it has been another grueling 14 weeks or so on this chapter alone. Also, as I am now typing the chapter up and watching it grow, it looks as though instead of getting more streamlined, my chapters are only getting longer. Unless I edit more extensively than I have done in the past, this one will be my longest chapter yet. At first this bothered me, since I always envisioned that I would have 12-15 chapters in this novel. After I complete this one, it looks like the draft of the entire novel to this point is already going to be close to 300 pages! It seems way too long to me. But, as I was commenting to Duke recently, I cannot worry about that now. I would much rather have too much to work with than too little, and I have to get the story out of me. I can worry about more cuts when I have a complete draft of Only the Dying in front of me. Furthermore, I know of at least one novel that I have great admiration for, Edward P. Jones' the Known World, that has lengthy chapters, and that didn't seem to weigh his novel down. On the contrary: it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Not making any predictions, of course, but the point is that long chapters didn't mar his book.
So, I would say that in general, far from being concerned, I am very pleased with the progress of the novel so far on the story side of it. I feel immersed in the material, and I feel as though I have a strong sense of that bygone Hoosier world, or more correctly of that world as I imagine it to have been. I am not as pleased about the laconic speed at which I am working, but it is true that I have never worked quickly on much of anything, and certainly not anything literary. It is not simple for me to find the required time to write and rewrite. I am not in a good position to neglect my responsibilities to other things, nor would I ever want to. Indeed, there are more reasons than ever for me now to be a responsible and realistic adult while chasing down my dreams. (See note below.)
Nonetheless, I do want to be a novelist, there's no hiding that fact, and as I turn 37 today, at least I can say I am working steadily towards that difficult goal. I have to date drafted one Prologue and four chapters of a novel. It's the best progress I have made towards this goal in all 37 of those years. I hope to write about 6-9 more chapters, give or take, and an Epilogue of some kind before I am done. A long time ago, I gave myself until I was 40 to have my first novel in the can. I thought that seemed reasonable. As I hit 37, I don't know if I will reach this milestone, but I do know and am proud to say that I have made measurable progress.
One other note. I have recently learned that in addition to my two daughters, age 4 and almost 2, my wife and I will soon be welcoming a third child into the world. My new son or daughter is due to arrive around May 31, 2008. I'd better get as much writing in as I can now! I want to achieve my dreams so that I may demonstrate to my new child as well as my other children that dreams are attainable with hard work. May God bless all my children, for it is for their sake that I intend to better myself in matters of art and of faith.
This edition of the journal is being written on November 7, 2007, which happens to be my 37th birthday. Thirty-seven on the seventh, in the seventh year of this millennium. Is this a positive omen? We can hope so. I may end up posting this on a later date, but I'm writing it on November 7, so it is on the actual day I was born. For those paying attention, by the way, it's also the day my cohort on this blog, Duke, was born, since we're idential twins. So: happy birthday Duke! Nice to cross the line on another year with you.
Since this is ostensibly a journal that marks progress on my 'novel', tentatively titled Only the Dying, it is good to report here today that as of yesterday, or November 6, I finished writing the draft of Chapter IV, 'A Lawyer's Return, Life After Death'. For those keeping the stats (I like to pretend that I have a whole crew working on this project, when it's really just me that's responsible), I started writing the chapter on July 20 and finished on November 6, so it has been another grueling 14 weeks or so on this chapter alone. Also, as I am now typing the chapter up and watching it grow, it looks as though instead of getting more streamlined, my chapters are only getting longer. Unless I edit more extensively than I have done in the past, this one will be my longest chapter yet. At first this bothered me, since I always envisioned that I would have 12-15 chapters in this novel. After I complete this one, it looks like the draft of the entire novel to this point is already going to be close to 300 pages! It seems way too long to me. But, as I was commenting to Duke recently, I cannot worry about that now. I would much rather have too much to work with than too little, and I have to get the story out of me. I can worry about more cuts when I have a complete draft of Only the Dying in front of me. Furthermore, I know of at least one novel that I have great admiration for, Edward P. Jones' the Known World, that has lengthy chapters, and that didn't seem to weigh his novel down. On the contrary: it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Not making any predictions, of course, but the point is that long chapters didn't mar his book.
So, I would say that in general, far from being concerned, I am very pleased with the progress of the novel so far on the story side of it. I feel immersed in the material, and I feel as though I have a strong sense of that bygone Hoosier world, or more correctly of that world as I imagine it to have been. I am not as pleased about the laconic speed at which I am working, but it is true that I have never worked quickly on much of anything, and certainly not anything literary. It is not simple for me to find the required time to write and rewrite. I am not in a good position to neglect my responsibilities to other things, nor would I ever want to. Indeed, there are more reasons than ever for me now to be a responsible and realistic adult while chasing down my dreams. (See note below.)
Nonetheless, I do want to be a novelist, there's no hiding that fact, and as I turn 37 today, at least I can say I am working steadily towards that difficult goal. I have to date drafted one Prologue and four chapters of a novel. It's the best progress I have made towards this goal in all 37 of those years. I hope to write about 6-9 more chapters, give or take, and an Epilogue of some kind before I am done. A long time ago, I gave myself until I was 40 to have my first novel in the can. I thought that seemed reasonable. As I hit 37, I don't know if I will reach this milestone, but I do know and am proud to say that I have made measurable progress.
One other note. I have recently learned that in addition to my two daughters, age 4 and almost 2, my wife and I will soon be welcoming a third child into the world. My new son or daughter is due to arrive around May 31, 2008. I'd better get as much writing in as I can now! I want to achieve my dreams so that I may demonstrate to my new child as well as my other children that dreams are attainable with hard work. May God bless all my children, for it is for their sake that I intend to better myself in matters of art and of faith.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Striving to Prove Yeats Wrong
A few evenings ago I sat down in eager anticipation (for I had been meaning to catch up with this for a long time) to watch Ken Burns' documentary film on the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The films opens to a black screen and the following quote appears, the first thing you see:
"The intellect of man is forced to
choose perfection of the life,
or of the work, and if it takes
the second must refuse a heavenly
mansion, raging in the dark."
-William Butler Yeats
No doubt this is a famous stanza but I had not heard it before, and knowing something about both the genius and the tumultuous personal life of Mr. Wright, I was struck by how perfectly appropriate it was for the subject matter at hand... but perhaps even moreso by its profound relevance for anyone who is interested in pursuing some kind of artistic vocation, and balancing that desire with a healthy and (if one is a Christian) even a holy life. I mention the holy there not only because of the concerns that undergird this blog, but also because Yeats himself hints at it there in his allusion to the 'heavenly mansion' an artist, or so he seems to imply, chooses to forsake in the earthly pursuit of his art.
It is a troubling quotation for those of us interested in balancing dreams of creating great art alongside hopes to become worthwhile men/women, husbands/wives, fathers/mothers, and, finally, disciples of Christ.
A Christian artist (and by this I mean a Christian who strives to create art, not one who has necessarily been recognized as an artist by the society in which he or she lives!) fearfully recognizes both the warning and the challenge in Yeats' quatrain. My brother and co-creator of this blog, Mutt, knows this struggle all too well. I know it too, but at this point in my life am not pursuing my own artistic dreams with the vigor and determination equal to his (for various reasons). But Mutt is aware, sometimes painfully so, of the extremely difficult balancing act that is required of him as he tries to pursue his chief calling, that of God-fearing husband and father, while at the same time chasing down that elusive but worthy dream of becoming a novelist. Each of these pursuits exacts a personal price, but in the first case it is easy to see that the returns are well worth the struggle. This is not so clear, however, in the case of the second. And therein lies some of the danger. If a man allows his frustrations and disappointments over the second stuggle to interfere with his attempts to lead a good life, is he not somehow morally, or even spiritually, compromised?
This is one of the questions implicit in Yeats' words, and he seems to be holding to the line that a man cannot possibly be both 'great' in art and 'good' (in a moral sense) in life. But a Christian artist must strive in his own life to prove Yeats wrong. As Christians, we have no higher calling than to pursue a place in that 'heavenly mansion,' and if we are fathers and husbands, the way we will work out this salvation is through a life of faithful and loving service to our families. But this should not preclude us from also putting into practice whatever artistic talents have been gifted to us by our Creator. I do not believe that God has made it to be a rigid, either/or proposition. The witness of so many great artists in Western (and at least nominally, Christian) culture can lead us to despair on this question, but we should not take any one man's (or woman's) case as our norm. The Lord has called each of us by name, to pursue a vocation unique to our own souls. Let us live up to that great challenge he has set before us. Let us never be afraid to pursue the True, the Good and the Beautiful, in all of its forms, with integrity and passion -- but let us refuse to compromise our attempts at holiness in order to do so. Our success is not up to us... but our spiritual lives are indeed our own responsibility.
So, to echo Pope John Paul II (echoing Jesus): "Rise, let us be on our way..."
"The intellect of man is forced to
choose perfection of the life,
or of the work, and if it takes
the second must refuse a heavenly
mansion, raging in the dark."
-William Butler Yeats
No doubt this is a famous stanza but I had not heard it before, and knowing something about both the genius and the tumultuous personal life of Mr. Wright, I was struck by how perfectly appropriate it was for the subject matter at hand... but perhaps even moreso by its profound relevance for anyone who is interested in pursuing some kind of artistic vocation, and balancing that desire with a healthy and (if one is a Christian) even a holy life. I mention the holy there not only because of the concerns that undergird this blog, but also because Yeats himself hints at it there in his allusion to the 'heavenly mansion' an artist, or so he seems to imply, chooses to forsake in the earthly pursuit of his art.
It is a troubling quotation for those of us interested in balancing dreams of creating great art alongside hopes to become worthwhile men/women, husbands/wives, fathers/mothers, and, finally, disciples of Christ.
A Christian artist (and by this I mean a Christian who strives to create art, not one who has necessarily been recognized as an artist by the society in which he or she lives!) fearfully recognizes both the warning and the challenge in Yeats' quatrain. My brother and co-creator of this blog, Mutt, knows this struggle all too well. I know it too, but at this point in my life am not pursuing my own artistic dreams with the vigor and determination equal to his (for various reasons). But Mutt is aware, sometimes painfully so, of the extremely difficult balancing act that is required of him as he tries to pursue his chief calling, that of God-fearing husband and father, while at the same time chasing down that elusive but worthy dream of becoming a novelist. Each of these pursuits exacts a personal price, but in the first case it is easy to see that the returns are well worth the struggle. This is not so clear, however, in the case of the second. And therein lies some of the danger. If a man allows his frustrations and disappointments over the second stuggle to interfere with his attempts to lead a good life, is he not somehow morally, or even spiritually, compromised?
This is one of the questions implicit in Yeats' words, and he seems to be holding to the line that a man cannot possibly be both 'great' in art and 'good' (in a moral sense) in life. But a Christian artist must strive in his own life to prove Yeats wrong. As Christians, we have no higher calling than to pursue a place in that 'heavenly mansion,' and if we are fathers and husbands, the way we will work out this salvation is through a life of faithful and loving service to our families. But this should not preclude us from also putting into practice whatever artistic talents have been gifted to us by our Creator. I do not believe that God has made it to be a rigid, either/or proposition. The witness of so many great artists in Western (and at least nominally, Christian) culture can lead us to despair on this question, but we should not take any one man's (or woman's) case as our norm. The Lord has called each of us by name, to pursue a vocation unique to our own souls. Let us live up to that great challenge he has set before us. Let us never be afraid to pursue the True, the Good and the Beautiful, in all of its forms, with integrity and passion -- but let us refuse to compromise our attempts at holiness in order to do so. Our success is not up to us... but our spiritual lives are indeed our own responsibility.
So, to echo Pope John Paul II (echoing Jesus): "Rise, let us be on our way..."
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Duke Altum's Poem of the Week #57
Here's one for all true book lovers out there... some wonderful imagery in this poem from Charles Simic, the recently-named Poet Laureate of the United States. I love the idea of untold riches lying in wait within 'dark unopened books,' if only we would take time to pull them off the shelf and explore them... then again, more and more these days we are not doing so. And the poem brilliantly gives us a glimpse of what it is we're missing...
"The books are whispering"... we must slow down, quiet ourselves and try to hear what it is they're saying. Is it too much to say that our very souls depend on it?
*******
In the Library
There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies. The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.
"The books are whispering"... we must slow down, quiet ourselves and try to hear what it is they're saying. Is it too much to say that our very souls depend on it?
*******
In the Library
There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies. The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.
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