YE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND Yes, this was on my bookshelf and yes, I actually used to consult it.
I have previously posted on my favorite exercises for a fast-acting manuscript Rx, what I call “emulation” or “permutation” exercises, here. (Which one is it, emulation or permutation? Depends. That would be another post.)
The basic idea is to take a phrase or perhaps as many as a few sentences from another writer’s work or from your own manuscript, and play with it in some predetermined way. Sometimes the exercise might prompt a new piece; othertimes it might give you just what you need to brighten up the blah or smooth a rough patch in a draft. Moreover, for my wampum, permutation exercises beat crossword puzzles by a Texas section. (Yowie, that was an orangutang’s tea party of imagery!)
Yes, I am being silly. To play, you have to be
willing to be silly! Tell your ego to just take a long cool breath. You, dear
writerly reader, do not have to use the results of your writing exercises in
your manuscript, never mind show them to anyone else.
Simply, for any given permutation exercise, come
up with a bunch of things! Maybe elegant, maybe dorky. Maybe even dorksterly
dorkikins dorky. Then circle the one or two results that, for whatever reason,
strike your fancy and/or seem apt for your purposes.
In my experience, and that of many of my writing
students, doing these exercises is a tiny investment for a mega-payoff. The
more often you do these little exercises, the easier they get, and this ease
will greatly serve you in your endeavors to write, and in particular, to write
more vividly. You will also get practice in generating material you are able
to, la de da, discard. And discarding unworthy bits and pieces of a
draft, and even whole novels, without attachment, that’s a vital skill for a
writer, too.
“IT’S LIKE DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN”
There are as many permutation exercises as you
can dream up. This one, what I call “Blast Past Easy,” plays with
cliché.
How can you spot a cliché? If a phrase sounds
familiar and/ or it came to you too easily, it’s probably a cliché.
What’s wrong with cliché? For more discerning readers, whom presumably you would want to have, cliché signals a lack of originality and/or naiveté and/or sloppiness. In sum: mediocrity. There are exceptions– for example, a fictional character or the subject of biography might use cliché (and if they do, that tells us something about them, does it not?) And some essayists use cliché for comic effect. (I’ll be posting about intentional diction drops anon.)
“Like deja vu all over again”– well,
you can debate me, but I’m going to call that a cliché, except as used by
Yogi Berra, because he’s the one who came up with it.
Here are a few clichés I happened upon in recent
weeks’ reading, and my permutations– four each. If you feel so moved, a good
exercise could be to add more permutations of your own.
“Talk does not boil the rice” Talk does not shampoo the pooch Talk does not slice the pepperoni Talk does not iron the shirts Talk does not roast the turkey
(You might try a permutation of the noun,
“talk,” e.g., art; violin playing; texting
“Bet you dollars for donuts” Bet you deutschmarks for Dingdongs Bet you dinars for dinos Bet you dollars for diddlysquat Bet you pounds for peanuts
(Part of what makes “dollars for
donuts” such an appealing cliché is the alliteration, that is, the
repeating “d”s of “dollars” and “donuts.” You
might try varying the sound, e.g., silver for Skittles, or, pesos for pips,
etc.)
“Let the cat out of the bag” Let the cockroach out of the bag Let the bedbug out of the backpack Let the tarantula out of the pickle jar Let the worm out of the compost pile
(Another permutation could be to switch the verb,
e.g, Put the cat in the bag; stuff the cat in the bag; drown the cat in the
bag; swing the cat in the bag, etc.)
“The bee’s knees” The snail’s tail The donkey’s ankle The sloth’s toenail (doesn’t rhyme but, oh well, I like it) The kitten’s mittens (is that a cliché?)
“A fish out of water” A mole out of its hole A horse out of its pasture A sheep out of its herd A troll out of his cave A credit card nowhere near a department store
“Barrel, Mirror, Telephone” In three sentences or less describe the barrel. In three sentences or less describe the mirror. Where is the telephone? Describe what happens.
“Systems analysis must become cultural
analysis, and in this historians may be helpful.”– Lynn White, Jr.
Drive into Far West Texas and before you can say
“pass the Snickers” you’ll spy the railroad tracks, which more often
than not run, seemingly infinite sinuous ribbons, parallel to the highway.
Travel for a spell and you’ll pass or, if at a crossing, be passed by a freight
train, always an impressive experience. All of which is to say, railroads are
an inescapable part of Far West Texas scenery and history, and so, for my book
in-progress on that region, I have been doing my homework.
Of late: The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German historian and scholar of cultural studies. Originally published as Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, the English translation came out in 1979; I read the 2014 edition with a new preface, “World Machines: The Steam Engine, the Railway, and the Computer,” in which Schivelbusch asks,
“Could it be that the railway, the
accelerator of the Industrial Revolution, and the computer occupy different
points along / on the same trajectory of machine evolution?”
In recent weeks, this question of machine
evolution, to my surprise, has begun to interest me intensely.
At first I had thought of this book I am writing about Far West Texas as a doppelgänger to my 2002 memoir of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, Miraculous Air, for the ecosystems and early exploration and mission histories of these two regions have many parallels. There are indeed many parallels, however, to start with, the literature on Far West Texas is exponentially greater and– more to the point– since the time I was traveling in Baja California, the experience of traveling itself has been radically transformed by the Digital Revolution. My sense of this is a compression of time and a curious elasticity of space; of oftentimes disquieting and othertimes most welcome transparency; and that constant pull to the little screens that, so it would seem, we all feel these days, whenever, wherever.
In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch opens
with a detailed discussion of the history of the steam engine.
“Next to wood, water and wind power were the main energy sources of pre-industrial economic life. The Industrial Revolution, generally seem as having begun in the the last third of the eighteenth century, was a complex process of denaturalization… Iron became the new industrial building material, coal the new combustible. In the steam engine, the prime mover of industry, these two combined to produce energy in theoretically unlimited amounts.”
The “decisive step” for the development
of the steam engine– and ultimately the railroads– was the introduction of
rotary motion, “a kind of mechanization of the mill race.” In other
words, transforming the up-and-down movement of the steam-driven piston
to the driving wheel.
In his new 2014 preface, however, Schivelbusch
writes: “It took me forty years and the Digital Revolution to realize that
I had missed the more important point of the invention preceding it.” In
other words, the technological Crossing of the Rubicon, as it were, was
“placing a piston in a cylinder and applying the pressure of steam… [I]t
did not transfer an existing form but forced a new form of power out of
combustible matter.” Moreover, “the piston’s up-and-down movement
was no longer the analogue of any form of movement found in nature but
possessed a binary-digital logic all its own.”
Watch a demonstration of a piston (in this
example, powered by an electric motor):
Most histories of the computer’s binary-digital
logic that I am familiar with focus on English mathematician George Boole’s An
Investigation into the Laws of Thought (1854)– the concept of binary
logic. Schivelbusch’s is a wondrously powerful insight.
THE MACHINE ENSEMBLE
In his second chapter, “The Machine
Ensemble,” Schivelbusch explores the ways the development of the railways
was experienced as “denaturalization and densensualization.” With
cuttings, embankments, and tunnels”the railroad was constructed straight
across the terrain, as if drawn with a ruler.” Now “the traveler
perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the machine ensemble.”
And what is the machine ensemble? “[W]heel
and rail, railroad and carriage, expanded into a unified railway system… one
great machine covering the land.”
RAILROAD SPACE
With the railroad, argues Schivelbusch,
“space was both diminished and expanded.” Things moved across space
faster, and simultaneously, more space could be accessed. “What was
experienced as being annihilated was the traditional space-time coninuum which
characterized the old transport technology.”
Schivelbusch quotes the German poet Heinrich
Heine, writing in 1843:
Heinrich Heine, protosurrealist
“What changes must now occur, in our way of looking at things, in our notions! Even the elementary concepts of time and space have begun to vacillate. Space is killed by the railways, and we are left with time lone… Now you can travel to Orléans in four and a half hours, and it takes no longer to get to Rouen. Just imagine what will happen when the lines to Belgium and Germany are completed and connected up with their railways! I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the linden trees; the North Sea’s breakers are rolling against my door.”
Sniffed Victorian-era English art critic John
Ruskin:
“Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from being a parcel.”
(I quail to imagine what might have been Ruskin’s
reaction to a TSA line. We airline travelers have been demoted from parcel to
cattle…)
PANORAMIC TRAVEL
For me, having spent so many hours driving
through the vast spaces of Far West Texas, the fourth chapter, “Panoramic
Travel,” was the most engaging. The opening epigraph is from Emerson’s Journals:
“Dreamlike traveling on the railroad.” In a car, as in a railway
compartment, we are enclosed from the weather behind windows, and by a roof and
a floor. We rest our bodies in an upholstered seat. Beyond the window, things
sail by silently, inexorably, scentlessly: hills, fences, a gas station– it
becomes a blur.
Travel by railroad induced “panoramic
perception.” Schivelbusch:
“Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. That machine and the motion it created became integrated into his viual perception: thus he could only see things in motion. That mobility of vision– for a traditionally oriented sensorium, such as Ruskin’s– became a prerequisite for the ‘normality’ of panoramic vision. This vision no longe experiences evanescence: evanescent reality had become the new reality.” (p.64)
Because this can be deadly boring, and
necesitated being in close quarters with fellow travelers of, shall we say,
possibly inconvenient social connections, bougeois train travelers took up
reading. Schivelbusch:
“Reading while traveling became almost obligatory.The dissolution of reality and its resurrection as panorama thus became agents for the total emancipation from the traversed landscape: the traveler’s gaze could then move into an imaginary surrogate landscape, that of his book.” (p. 64)*
But back to computers. I am beginning, with
fraying patience, to think of ours as the Age of Phubbing Smombies. To walk the
aisle of a railway passenger car or an airplane is to catch the soundless
glow of dozens of little screens… the overwhelming majority not of text but
of flashing images of murders, faces, scantily clad women, roaring dinosaurs,
cars and other objects hurling off cliffs (what is it with all the cliffs?)..
and cartoons of the same… In sum, a mesmerizing mishmash of imagery.
AMERICAN VS EUROPEAN RAILROADS
In the 19th century the “great machine”
of the railway ensemble spread across the land in both Europe and the
North American continent, but, as Schivelbusch details, there were fundamental
differences in the pattern and nature of that machine. Europe was already
densely populated and richly networked by highways and roads; “in America,
the railroad served to open up, for the first time, vast regions of previously
unsettled winderness.”* In other words, to quote Schivelbusch quoting von
Weber, “In Europe, the railroad facilitates traffic; in
America, it creates it.”
*Quibble: Important regions of America’s interior were not in fact a wholly “unsettled wilderness” until after the cascading demographic collapses, and later Indian removals, and the Indian Wars. There were well-established trails and trade routes throughout the continent, many going back many hundreds of years. But yes, compared to Europe, the road networks in Amreica were thin and poor and the vast desert expanses and the Great Plains were terrible to traverse by horse-drawn vehicles, as many memoirs attest.
And while Europe’s industrial revolution focused
on manufacturing, primarily textiles, in America it was about agriculture
(cotton, tobacco) and transport. In the early 19th century, what American
industry had in the way of machines was, writes Schivelbusch, “river
steamboats, railroad trains, sawmills, harvesting combines.”
By the 19th century the string of older cities of
the North Atlantic coast– Boston down to Washington DC– were linked by
well-established highways, however, the rest of the continent had more
primitive roads, oftentimes what amounted to footpaths and, above all,
waterways: The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Hudson, various canals,
and the Great Lakes. “Thus passenger travel used these waterways in the
absence of highways… One traveled by water whenever possible.”
Unsurprisingly, the American railway compartment
took on the distinctive character of the American riverboat cabin. These tended
to be broad open rooms, more comfortable for traveling long distances. European
railroad compartments took their template from the stagecoach, a cozier space.
Schivelbuch argues that in American culture the
railroad was closely linked with the steamer both because it was these were the
first and second mechanized means of transportation and because so much of the
interior landcape– the Great Plains–was described by travelers as kind of
vast ocean. (Indeed it was, in an eon past, the bottom of an ocean.)
The path of the railroad tracks differed as well:
American tracks tended to curve where European tracks would be straight. As
Schivelbusch points out, this reflected differences in labor and land costs. In
America, land was cheap and labor expensive. In Europe then “it paid to
construct tunnels, embankments and cuttings in order to make the rails proceed
in a straight line, at a minimum of land cost.”
Ah, so that explains the sinuosity of those Far
West Texas rails.
INDUSTRIALIZED CONSCIOUSNESS
“new consciousness of time and space based on train schedules and the novel activity of reading while traveling” (p.160)
Re: The reconsideration of the concept of shock
in the 19th century. Schivelbusch:
“The railroad related to the coach and horses as the modern mass army relates to the medieval army of knights (and as manufacture and industry do to craftmanship.)” (p.159)
Re: A “sinister aspect”.
Schivelbusch:
“…it had become possible to travel in something that seemed like an enormous grenade.” (p.160)
“The train passenger of the later nineteenth century who sat reading his book thus had a thicker layer of that skin than the earlier traveler, who coud not even think about reading because the journey still was, for him, a space-time adventure that engaged his entire sensorium.” (p.165)
(Thicker layer of skin!! Just turn on TV news!!
The commercials!! In our day, we’ve all grown callouses on top of rhino hide.)
HAUSSMANN’S REDO OF PARIS AND A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS FOR A NEW CITYSCAPE
Schivelbusch covers Haussmann’s remodeling of
Paris in detail in chapter 12, “Tracks in the City.”
“The streets Haussmann created served only traffic, a fact that distinguished them from the medieval streets an lanes that they destroyed, whose function was not so much to serve traffic as to be a forum for neighborhood life; it also distinguihsed them from the boulevards and avenues of the Baroque, who linearity and width was designed more for pomp and ceremony han for mere traffic.” (p. 183)
“The broad, tree-lined streets were seen as providers of light and air, creating sanitary conditions in both a physiological and a political sense– the latter favorable to the rule of Napoleon III.” (p. 186)
MORE ABOUT PANORAMIC PERCEPTION
The final chapter, “Circulation,” looks
at the consequences of the changes in transportation for retail, specifically,
the development of department stores.
“As Haussmann’s traffic arteries were connected to the rail network by means of the railway stations,and thus to all traffic in its entirety, the new department stores, in turn, were connected to the new intra-urban arteries and their traffic. The Grands Magasins that arose during the second half of the nineteenth century were concentrated on the boulevards that supplied them with goods and customers.” (p.188)
While traveling on the train put an end to
conversation, so the department store put an end to haggling, for now there
were price tags.
Department stores encouraged panoramic
perception.
“There had to be noise, commotion, life everywhere… The customer was kept in motion; he traveled through the department store as a train passenger traveled through the landscape. In their totality, the goods impressed him as an ensemble of objects and price tags fused into a pointillistic overall view…”(p. 191)
The sources of parnoramic perception were at once
speed and “the commodity character of objects.”(p. 193)
THE CIRCULATION CONCEPT IN THE 19th CENTURY
“… whatever was part of circulation was regarded as healthy, progressive, constructive; all that was detached from circulation, on the other hand, appeared diseased, medieval, subversive, threatening.” (p. 195)
CIAO, GRAND TOUR
Re: The Grand Tour, “an essential part of
… education before the industrialization of travel.” The world was
experienced in its original spatio-temporality… His education consisted of
his assimilation of the spatial individuality of the places visited, by means
of an effort that was both physical and intellectual” (p. 197)
(At this thought, of the industrialization of
travel, I had an evil little chuckle recalling Mrs Pofrock in Henry James’ The
Ambassadors.)
So:
“The railroad, the destroyer of experiential space and time, thus also destroyed the educational experience of the Grand Tour… the places visited by the traveler became increasingly similar to the commodities that were part of the same circulation system. For the twentieth-century tourist, the world has become one huge department store of countrysides and cities” (p. 197)
I would venture that a more apt analogy would now
be “menu of venues for digitally realized self-presentation” —
translation from the Noodathipious Flooflemoofle: “selfies.” I hear
most everyone shops online these days.
#
FURTHER TIDBITTY THOUGHTOID
A curious analogy occured to me, that just as the
automobile allowed for more agency for a traveler vis-a-vis the railroad, so
the tablets and smartphones allow more agency than the television for the
consumer of entertainment.
Without exception Taber’s works are superb, wondrous, must-reads for anyone who would explore the world from an armchair– and for anyone who would write their own. There is so much to relish and to learn from Taber’s daring, her mastery of the craft, her ability to see the most telling particulars, and the exquisite, sensuous beauty of her prose.
Based just outside Washington DC, Taber is also a long-time writing teacher, currently leading workshops both privately and at the Writer’s Center (Bethesda MD) and elsewhere. And now, for both her workshop students and for those at a distance, who cannot take her workshop, just out from Johns Hopkins University Press, and with lovely illustrations by Maud Taber-Thomas, we have Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook.
I was honored to have been asked to contribute a blurb:
“Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars is at once a delicious read and the distilled wisdom of a long-time teacher and virtuoso of the literary memoir. Her powerful lessons will give you rare and vital skills: to be able to read the world around you, and to read other writers, as a writer, that is, with your beadiest conjurer’s eye and mammoth heart. This is a book to savor, to engage with, and to reread, again and again.” – C.M. Mayo
The following Q & A is reprinted from her publisher’s website (Johns Hopkins University Press):
Q: Why did you decide to write this book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: So that writers of any stripe—from travelers, to bloggers, to journal-keepers, to memoirists, essayists, and journalists—will know just what to note down so as to paint rich and vivid pictures of people and places, and create a lively record of their experiences in and responses to the world.
Q: What were some of the most surprising things you learned while writing/researching the book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: The writing of the book allowed me to put on all my hats—literary journalist, anthropologist, memoirist, essayist, journal-keeper, and traveler—and draw together in one place all that I have learned, from those various fields, about keeping a lively field notebook. Writing the book let me re-live the pleasure of field-notebook keeping and also offer the prodigious pleasure of the habit to others. It is a way to get to live your life twice.
Q: What do you hope people will take away from reading your book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: A sense of exhilaration—to stride out into the world, to experience it fully and observe it closely, and then to write about that world with all the richness and color they can muster.
Check out the trailer for Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars:
As of this year, my posts for the second Monday of the month are dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, I am work on a book of creative nonfiction about Far West Texas, a subject distant indeed from children’s literature. But Russell Hoban’s 1964 classic, Bread and Jam for Frances, is bright in my mind because in the recent days of my mother’s final illness, I read it to her several times.
Bread and Jam for Frances was a great favorite of ours, a book my mother read to me when I was learning to read in the early 1960s. She always appreciated children’s books, and often gave copies of her favorites as gifts. Other favorites of hers included DuBose Heyward’s The Country Bunny and the Little Golden Shoes; Margaret Wise’s The Little Fur Family; anything and everything by Beatrix Potter; and many other titles about in Hoban’s series about Frances the badger and her little sister Gloria.
From 1939… still selling faster than little bunnies can hop…
In her last days my mother was unable to do more
than listen to TV news– and it pained me to sit in that room awash with
reports of shootings, bombings, crashes, the latest tweets from POTUS,
commercials for drugs and those breathlessly chirpy recitations of ghastly side
effects, and even such absurd “news” stories as– this one still
makes me chuckle– “Robotic Dinosaur on Fire!”* So I asked my mom if,
instead, I could read to her from some of her favorite children’s books and she
said, delightedly, yes.
*(Robotic Dinosaur on Fire!-– That’s the
title of my next book of poetry.)
What brings me to mention Bread and Jam for
Frances here is that, as I appreciated for the first time, the plot is at
once simple and unusually elegant.
GROKKING PLOT
No matter whether one is writing an adult
thriller, a romance novel, or a literary tour-de-force of an historical epic,
plot is something a writer needs to grok, before writing, during drafting, and
in the editing process. Where to go, what to cut? For many writers, particularly
those working on a first novel, plot can seem more difficult to wrestle down
than a wigged-out octupus.
The best and most complete craftmans’ treatment
of plot that I have found to date is in Robert McKee’s Story,
a book aimed at screenwriters, but almost every one of his yummy
nuggets applies to novels as well. That said, it’s a big, fat, doorstopper of a
crunchily crunchwich-with-garlic- sweetpotatoes-on-the-side kind of book, not
the most appropriate for a one day workshop, as I prefer to teach them.
These three and many more recommended books on craft are listed on my workshop page.
Gardner’s On the Art of Fiction is the
best introductory book on craft I know– over the past 30-odd years I have read
it and reread it more times than I can count (and bought new copies when the
old ones fell to pieces). However, on many an occasion, before I learned to
first give ’em ye olde cold fish of a caveat, the more sensitive among my
students would complain bitterly about Gardner’s arrogant tone. And to those of
you not in my workshop but who who have read and loathed Gardner, I say unto
you: Buck up, kiddos, or consider that Gardner did you a favor so you can quit
now because the literary world, like the whole big wide rest of it, makes
snowflakes sweat blood! Then flash-fries ’em to a crisp! Anyway, Gardner died
in a motorcycle accident years ago so you’re unlikely to ruffle his feathers
with your cranky review on Goodreads– which only makes you sound like a
flaming snowflake. SSSSsssss.
Seriously, have a laugh, shake off Gardner’s tone
like the peacocking silliness that it is; if you want to understand the art of
fiction, I urge you to read what he has to say. (Also, by the way, you can
ignore the subtitle, Notes on Craft for Young Writers. It’s for anyone
writing fiction, at any age.)
Of course, in a workshop it is necessary to talk about plot in reference to one or more specific novels. But one of the gnarliest challenges for a workshop is that reading a novel requires many hours– no time for that in a one day format– and even the most well-read writers may not have read the same books, nor share the same taste. Perhaps we have all read Edith Wharton, but for you it was Ethan Fromm, for me, The Custom of the Country. Willa Cather? Perhaps you read My Antonia and I read Death Comes for the Archbishop. And, Lord knows, there are perfectly intelligent and talented workshop students who have not heard of either Cather or Wharton. Lord also knows that, much as we may recommend our favorite novels to each other, even we roaringly avid readers may work but a fraction of the way down our towering to-read piles.
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, masters of American literature– and plot. My uberly-uber faves. In an ideal workshop I would dissect the plot in any one or or more of their novels (I should like to think that these ladies would have been charmed by Bread and Jam.)
What a fine thing then to have found a little
book, so short and sweet, with such an expertly wrought plot as Bread and
Jam for Frances.
But I cannot bring myself to do taxidermy, that is to say, a synopsis. For those of you looking to learn about plot (and/or find a worthy children’s book as a gift for your favorite young reader), may I suggest that you buy a copy of Bread and Jam for Frances, then read it, which won’t take you more than about 10 to fifteen minutes. Then return here, just below the ampersand.
~ & ~
Bread and Jam through the FICHTEAN CURVE
Think of this as a triangle (curvy if you wish)
where your story travels, episode-of-conflict by episode -of-conflict, up the
hypotenuse to the big pointy CLIMAX. Then, with your denouement– pronounced,
raising your nose oh so slightly, day-noo-mahn— slidey-slide down
to…The End!
Episode o’ conflict: At breakfast Frances does
not want an egg; she only wants bread and jam.
E o’ c: She admits she traded yesterday’s chicken
salad sandwich for bread and jam
E o’ c: At lunch she offers to trade her bread and
jam for a sandwich, is refused
E o’ c: At snack time her mother gives her not a
special snack but bread and jam
E o’ c: For dinner there are veal cutlets but
Frances gets… bread and jam
Climax: At the next dinner Frances cries and asks
for spaghetti and meatballs!
Denouement: For lunch the next day Frances enjoys
a lunch of a lobster salad sandwich and much more. She agrees with her friend
Albert that it is good to eat many different things.
Bread and Jam
through Syd Field’s THREE ACT PARADIGM
I SET UP Breakfast at home: Frances does not want her egg, only bread and jam. She admits she traded yesterday’s lunch of a chicken salad sandwich for bread and jam
Plot point (what takes us to Act II): It’s time
for Frances to go to school
II CONFRONTATION Lunch with Albert, Albert has a nice lunch while Frances has only bread and jam.
Snack time, it’s still bread and jam.
Dinner, still bread and jam.
Dinner again, bread and jam
Plot point (what takes us to Act III): Frances cries
and asks for meatballs and spaghetti
III RESOLUTION Frances enjoys her meatballs and spaghetti
The next day, Frances opens her lunch box to find
a very nice lunch with a lobster salad sandwich and, with her friend Albert,
discusses how nice it is to eat many things
#
Perchance this sounds silly. Am I saying that we
can compare the simple little plot in Bread and Jam for Frances with
that of such literary heavyweights as say, The Custom of the Country? Death
Comes for the Archbishop? Or, for that matter, The Great Gatsby? Yes,
dear writerly readers, that is what I am saying– and moreover, that because
the plot of Bread and Jam for Frances is so compact and simple, it is
easier to see. And having seen it so clearly, you should then be better able to
see plot in your own work.
What does your plot look like through the
paradigm of the Fichtean curve? And of the three-acts?
Now your wigged-out octopus just might shed a few limbs, or at least, braid them together and sit up nicely and accept a cup of tea– and in between sips, calmly inform you, in his bubbly French accent, what’s to happen next. (Never a dull moment writing fiction.)
“What’s in the Kitchen Drawer?” This is a vocabulary expanding exercise— not about using new words, but rather words you already know but seldom use. List the objects in your kitchen drawer(s)— from the spatula to the grapefruit knife to the soup ladle.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell writes: “Love those books, and your essay! Hoban was featured in a display at Beinecke at Yale. I often think of Frances’s difficult experience with Thelma, the bad friend, who trades for her tea set.”
I happened upon the website of novelist Nancy Peacock in, of all places, the comments section of computer science professor Cal Newport’s blog. Newport is the author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Novelist Nancy Peacock’s comments there echoed my own on the topic of social media; moreover, as I am writing about the Seminole Scouts and the Indian Wars in Far West Texas, an undeservedly obscure subject, I was intrigued to learn about her latest novel, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.
From the catalog copy:
“For fans of Cold Mountain and The Invention of Wings comes a tour de force of historical fiction (Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain) that follows the epic journey of a slave-turned-Comanche warrior who travels from the brutality of a New Orleans sugar cane plantation to the indomitable frontier of an untamed Texas, searching not only for the woman he loves but so too for his own identity.
I have been to hangings before, but never my own.
Sitting in a jail cell on the eve of his hanging, April 1, 1875, freedman Persimmon Persy Wilson wants nothing more than to leave some record of the truth his truth. He may be guilty, but not of what he stands accused: the kidnapping and rape of his former master’s wife.
In 1860, Persy had been sold to Sweetmore, a Louisiana sugar plantation, alongside a striking, light-skinned house slave named Chloe. Their deep and instant connection fueled a love affair and inspired plans to escape their owner, Master Wilson, who claimed Chloe as his concubine. But on the eve of the Union Army s attack on New Orleans, Wilson shot Persy, leaving him for dead, and fled with Chloe and his other slaves to Texas. So began Persy’s journey across the frontier, determined to reunite with his lost love. Along the way, he would be captured by the Comanche, his only chance of survival to prove himself fierce and unbreakable enough to become a warrior. His odyssey of warfare, heartbreak, unlikely friendships, and newfound family would change the very core of his identity and teach him the meaning and the price of freedom.
From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Life Without Water, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson is a sweeping love story that is as deeply moving and exciting an American saga as has ever been penned –Lee Smith, author of Dimestore.”
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive literary writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
NANCY PEACOCK: My biggest experience with the digital revolution has been with Facebook. After much cajoling from an agent and the culture, I finally opened a Facebook account. That’s what we’re supposed to do, as writers, right? We’re supposed to promote our work every possible way. I was surprised to find things that mattered to me on Facebook, and then, as those things dwindled, I became addicted to searching for them. In the end, my mind became fractured, and I was unable to focus on what I needed to focus on: the writing. I deleted my FB account. I did not disable it. I deleted it, and I feel my mind healing. It was like coming off a drug.
I’m a very private person, and my writing grows from that. I need spaciousness to pull it all together, and spaciousness is coming to be seen a bit like the horse and buggy. Quaint and picturesque, but impractical. But I needed it. Not having it is a deal breaker to me.
I also spend a lot of time on research. Writing any novel requires keeping a lot of plates in the air. Writing a historical novel requires keeping those plates from colliding and breaking against facts and dates. It takes focus. I couldn’t focus because social media had splintered my ability to do so.
I think writers, and publishers (maybe especially publishers) need to start taking a bigger picture of what literature means, and what it has to offer that other forms of storytelling, namely movies and television, do not. Writing and reading are ways to slow down. I wish the industry would embrace that, and stop whipping the more, more, more horse.
For me it really came down to either being a writer or presenting as a writer. I chose the former.
C.M. MAYO: Are you in a writing group? If so, can you talk about the members, the process, and the value for you?
NANCY PEACOCK: I am in a writer’s group. The group grew from a women’s writers group which I led for years, and for income. Over time the members became very solid with each other, and I kept looking in from the position of leader thinking I want to join. I thought that for years. Finally I asked if they would accept me as a member, and they said yes. So I lost some income because I no longer lead the group, but I gained an incredible group. These women are sharp, funny, great listeners and exceptional responders to the written word. We have three novelists (one needs to finish her novel – she knows who she is!), a poet, and an essayist, short story writer, and poet combined into one amazing person, who also bakes great cakes! We’ve seen each other through life events, sickness, raising children, publication, struggling with the work (although it is mostly me who struggles and crashes with the work) and much more.
I think the format of a writing group is very important, and that not enough people pay attention to that. I don’t think just any comment goes. You need an agreement among the members on how to respond. For instance, I once brought in a piece to a different writing group. The piece mentioned being in therapy, and one of the members response was to say she was glad I was still in therapy. She said it again and again, and it was personal, a judgement on my sanity, and had nothing to do with the writing or the story I was telling. This was not OK at all and I tried to discuss it with them and got shot down for it. One of the reasons my current group works so well and has lasted so long is because we follow guidelines that were established at the very beginning.
C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing this novel, and if so, how did you break through them?
NANCY PEACOCK:The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson was the least blocked novel I have ever written. The opening line, “I have been to hangings before, but never my own,” arrived to me on a walk I took one morning to watch the sunrise. It literally was suddenly in my head. Out of nowhere. I went home and wrote it down, even though at the time I was very discouraged about writing and publishing and was thinking I might never write again. That evening I watched the documentary about The West by Ken Burns, and I idly wondered if there were any black Indians. I knew there were white Indians from having read The Captured by Scott Zesch years earlier. From these two things, the line in my head and the idea of a black Indian, the first chapter poured out of me.
With some books you labor hard to get to know the characters, and to gain their trust. With others you are possessed. This was a possession. I had to do a lot of research and shape the narrative around historical events, but Persy (Persimmon Wilson) was very willing to talk to me. I had a sense of urgency from him, just as if he was about to hang in a few days time, which at the opening of the novel, he is.
C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question. At what point, if any, were you working on paper for this novel? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
NANCY PEACOCK: I mostly compose on the computer. I don’t have trouble with it. I trained myself to do it with my first book. When it comes to anything but writing, I don’t like being on the screen. It’s the interaction between story and me that makes composing on the computer different from all other screen activity. If I get stuck on something, if a scene is not working, I turn to writing by hand. That usually makes something break through that wouldn’t come before. I also teach two prompt writing classes each week, during which I write with the students, and I sometimes use that time to work on a novel. I remember vividly writing the scene in which Persy is captured by the Comanche in my class, and reading it to them. It went almost verbatim into the book.
C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail?
NANCY PEACOCK: I am in active touch with a large group of local writers and readers because I’ve built a community around a free class that I teach once a month I’ve been doing this for fifteen years now, and hundreds of people have come through my workshop. Because of this community building, I’ve built a local fan base. National has proven more difficult, and I don’t really think social media helps. I think it’s spitting in the wind.
I have a website and occasionally hear from someone via the contact form. I always love hearing from anyone who’s read my book. I’ve found that if someone takes the time to contact me, it’s because they liked something in the book, so it’s (mostly) been a positive experience.
I’d like to encourage readers to contact writers whose work has impressed them. There’s so much competition to the printed page these days. I don’t even think publishing houses understand the unique value of the novel.
Another community building activity I hope to organize is a regular letter writing campaign to favorite authors. Real letters. Not email. Real letters (or postcards!) with stamps and handwritten words on them. I am extremely touched when I receive one of these, and I’d like to make a space for readers to reach out to writers. I’d like this to be a regular part of the reading experience. Another nod to the slowing down reading gives you. Nothing says love like snail mail!
There are some books, masterpieces as they may be, that one simply is not ready to read. For me, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby comes to mind. Trudging through it as assigned reading for my highschool English class, I could not fathom why anyone would celebrate this blather about the antics of a bunch of silly people! Zoom ahead a decade and a half, and then rereading it, however, I was in awe– at once, continually, and sledding into that elegy of a last line– of its majesty, its poetry, its utterly American genius (although indeed, it is about a bunch of silly people). I say the same about Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
Are you ready to read Four Arguments? Or
have you already? It’s an old book, originally published in the late 1970s. For
me to read Mander’s masterpiece in this Age of the Smombies has been one of the
most astonishing reads in my life. Yet I do not believe that I could have read
it any earlier. Or, perhaps, I should say: would that I had read it earlier.
Nancy Peacock comments:
“I read this book many, many years ago, first as a series of excerpts published in the Mother Earth News, and later, I purchased it and read it again. It is profound. I have told so many people about this book, and yet my recommendation always falls on deaf ears. The fact that is was published in the ’70s does not make it any less profound today. In fact in my opinion, given the technologies its author likely did not imagine and how they have taken over so many lives, it is even more profound. Thank you for posting this.” — Nancy Peacock www.nancypeacockbooks.com
Dense yet elegantly lucid, Stephen L. Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst was published by O’Reilly Associates in 1995, on the eve of the explosion of email, well before that of social media. Astonishingly, it delineates the nature of our now King Kong-sized challenges with technology, when those challenges were, so it now seems, but embryonic. And Talbott writes with unusual authority, grounded in both philosophy and his many years of writing and editing for O’Reilly Media, a prime mover in the economic / cultural juggernaut of a complex, increasingly dispersed from its origin in California’s Santa Clara Valley, that has become known as “Silicon Valley.”
> Talbott offers the entire text of The
Future Does Not Compute for free on his website at this link, along with an annotated table of contents. You
can also find a paperback edition from your go-to online bookseller.
From the catalog copy:
“Many pundits tell you that the computer is ushering us toward a new Golden Age of Information. A few tell you that the computer is destroying everything worthwhile in our culture. But almost no one tells you what Stephen L. Talbott shows in this surprising book: the intelligent machine gathers its menacing powers from hidden places within you and me. It does so, that is, as long as we gaze into our screens and tap on our keyboards while less than fully conscious of the subtle influences passing through the interface…
“The Net is the most powerful invitation to remain asleep we have ever faced. Contrary to the usual view, it dwarfs television in its power to induce passivity, to scatter our minds, to destroy our imaginations, and to make us forget our humanity. And yet — for these very reasons — the Net may also be an opportunity to enter into our fullest humanity with a self-awareness never yet achieved. But few even seem aware of the challenge, and without awareness we will certainly fail.”
For me Talbott’s work was a wondrous but belated
find, given my focus on the conundrums of technology in my book-in-progress on
Far West Texas (which also, on few occasions, ranges as far west as Silicon
Valley, for reasons which will be clear in the book itself).
NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT COMPUTE –BUT FIRST, OWEN BARFIELD
Owen Barfield: “Our destiny is to become conscious and free”
In his acknowledgements Talbott
writes that he is “indebted above all to a man I have met only though his
published writings: Owen Barfield.” Barfield (1898-1987) was an English philosopher,
author of Worlds Apart and Saving the Appearances, among many
other works, and part of the Oxford literary circle that included C.S.
Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkein. Writes Talbott:
“The core insights underlying all [Barfield’s] work remain among the most original scholarly achievements of this century. So original, in fact, that these insights are impossible to accept– even impossible to think.”
An important influence on Owen Barfield was the work of Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), most notably his book The Philosophy of Freedom. When he found Steiner’s works, Barfield had already independently come to many similar conclusions. In the documentary on Barfield cited above, “it was a case of like finding like.”
See the page on Rudolf Steiner here and an archive of his works here.
Caveat: Reading Steiner can get very strange very fast; not everyone has the stomach for reading about angelic channelings, epic battles in the supercelestial realms, etc. Steiner’s Anthroposophy is an offshoot of Theosophy, and as such, heavily influenced by many of the ideas of Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky. (Read a brief note about Madame Blavatsky, the monumental figure of modern esotercism, in the excerpt from my book about Francisco I. Madero here.)
But: keep your shoes on your feet and your helmet
buckled onto your coconut! Steiner was, among many other things, the founder of
the Waldorf Schools. Read about that influence in Silicon Valley here (New
York Times) and here (Business
Insider). There is also a video posted
in 2013 by the Waldorf School of the Peninsula which explains the
educational philosophy in some detail.
(I’m focusing on computers here, so I won’t get
into Steiner and Biodynamic Agriculture; do Google or Duckduckgo should you
feel so moved. P.S. Wikipedia, aka wiki-whenever-whomever-whatever, is likely
not your best source of information on this subject.)
“[This is] the most radical book that Steiner wrote, it is the foundation of all his thought… I think it is the only book that would have convinced me he had something important… to say… he is removing the blinkers from the Western mindset. He clarifies the act of knowing… he brings it down to the simplest possible elements and he shows you where, in your thinking, it’s possible that you might be free. He shows you, there’s a self-contained place in your thinking where it’s absolutely clear that you could be free…. If you build from that place, you can be sure that what you are thinking and feeling and willing is coming from a place that is not being determined by anybody or anything else… we can begin to know ourselves in the world, and that would be the true basis of freedom.”
BACK TO NOTES ON TALBOTT’S THE FUTURE DOES NOT
COMPUTE
Talbott:
“During most of [the] seventeen years I was working with computers, and it slowly became clear to me that the central issues bedeviling all of us who try to understand the relation between the human being and the computer are issues upon which Barfield began throwing light some seven decades ago. The Future Does Not Compute is my attempt to reflect a little of that light toward the reader.”
Talbott on awareness of self and awareness of the nature of machines:
“Machines become a threat when they embody our limitations without our being fully aware of those limitations. All reason shouts at us to approach every aspect of the computer with the greatest caution and reserve. But what incentive has our culture provided for the exercise of such caution and reserve? It’s more in our nature to let technology lead where it will, and to celebrate that leading as progress.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“On the one hand: the machine as an expression of the human being. On the other hand: the machine as an independent force that acts or reacts upon us. Which is it? I am convinced there is no hope for understanding the role of technology in today’s world without our first learning to hold both sides of the truth in our minds, flexibly and simultaneously. The relationship between human being and machine has become something like a complex symbiosis.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“If it is only through self-awareness and inner adjustment that I can restrict the hammer in my hands to its proper role, I must multiply the effort a millionfold when dealing with a vasty more complex technology– one expression in a much more insistent manner its own urgencies.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“understanding is the basis of freedom.” Ch. 2 “The Machine in the Ghost”
“the computer, one might almost say, was invented as an inevitable refinement of the corporation” Ch. 3 “The Future Does Not Compute”
“what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought… The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsability for them.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“another word for responsability is ‘dominion’– not the dominion of raw power, but of effective wisdom.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“We can no longer stop or even redirect the engine of technological change by brute, external force. Such force is the principle of the engine itself, and only strengthens it. We must tame technology by rising above it and reclaiming what it not mechanical in ourselves.” Ch. 5 “On Being Responsible for Earth”
“But Mander does neglect one critical fact: what we have embodied in technology are our own habits of thought. Yes, our artifacts gain a life of their own, but it is, in a very real sense, our life. We too easily ignore the ways in which we infuse these artifacts with the finespun web of our own, largely subconscious habits of thought. The need is to raise these habits to full consciousness, and then take responsibility for them.
[Much of chapter 6 includes a scathing attack on
George Gilder’s ideas.]
“…the more complex and indirect the mechanisms through which human action come into expression, the more you and I must be masters of ourselves.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…one way or another, you are creating your future. Wake up before you find that the devils within you have done the creating.” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the view that a technology can be ‘democratizing and leveling’ testifies to a radical alienation from everything that constitutes both the inner life and culture” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“…the telephone, automobile, radio, and television have all contributed to social fragmentation, personal isolation, and alienation from both self and other” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
“What hope is there for peace and human rights when I conceive the barriers separating me from my fellows to be mere obstructions on a network technology diagram rather than the powers of darkness shadowing my own heart?” Ch. 6 “Networks and Communities”
On freedom and power:
“The need is to recognize ourselves in our machines, and our machines in ourselves, and begin to raise ourselves above our machines.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“Freedom, you might say, is not a state, but a tension” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“The doing required of us is a refusal to continue seeing all problems as the result of a doing rather than a being, as technical rather than spiritual.” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
“…if we persist in the cultivation of a purely technical stance toward our work and our technology, we will find that, like the corporation, it takes on a life of its own, which is at the same time, our life–but out of control and less than fully conscious… this autonomous life may exercise a totalitarian suppression of the human spirit that will be all the more powerful for its diffuseness and invisibility” Ch. 7 “At the Fringe of Freedom”
On the so-called “global village”:
“…could it be that what we so eagerly embrace, unawares, are the powers of dissolution themselves?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“…what concerns me is the likelihood of our expressing within a new social and technological landscape the same spiritual vacuity that gave rise to the old tyrannies” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
“The global village is… a technological creation. Many would-be village architects are inspired by te endless potentials they discern in a satellite dish planted among thatched roof houses. This techno-romantic image calls up visions of information sharing and cooperation, grassroots power, and utopian social change. What it ignores is the monolithic and violently assimilative character of the resulting cultural bridges.” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On awareness and loss:
“The light of mathematics may have descended into our minds from the circling stars, but how many students of mathematics still look to the night sky with wonder?” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
On “helping” developing countries by bringing modern technology:
“the logic and assumptions of our technology can prove bitterly corrosive. Worse, the kind of community from which Western technical systems commonly arise is, for the most art, noncommunity–typified by the purely technical, one-dimenional, commercially motivated, and wholly rationalized environments of corporate research and development organizations.”
More:
“…human life can be sustained only within a sea of meaning, not a network of information” Ch. 9 “Do We Really Want a Global Village?”
Heavvvvy….
“…our rush to wire the world will some day be seen to have spawned a suffering as great as that caused by this century’s most ruthless dictators”
On the corporation (corporation as machine):
“Is the corporation a human activity in the service of human needs, or not? It is remarkble how easily and subtly the human-centered view slips from our grasp. Indeed, just so far as the corporation is viewed as an enterprise designed to score a profit, rather than to serve worthwhile ends under the discipline of economic controls, to that extent the entire organization has already been cut loose from its human justification and reduced to something like a computational machine” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Nugget o’ wisdom:
“… every problem is a gift… [it] invites the production of new, human “capital.’ This is far different from seeing a problem merely as something to be gotten rid of by the most efficient means possible.” Ch. 10 “Thoughts on a Group Support System”
Essence:
“It’s not the Net we’re talking about here; it’s you and me. And surely that’s the only place to begin. Neither liberation nor oppression can become living powers in any soil except that of the human heart” Ch 11
Yep:
“If we experience our machines as increasingly humanlike, then we are experiencing ourselves as increasingly machinelike.” Ch 11
“…we are strongly tempted to use our freedom in order to deny freedom, pursuing instead the mechanization of life and thought” Ch 11
“… what is directly at risk now–what the computer asks us to abdicate– are our independent powers of awareness. Yet these powers are the only means by which we can raise ourselves above the machine” Ch 11
“What if the human being to whom we so beautifully adapt the computer is the wrong sort of human being? What if our efforts really amount to a more effective adaptation of the human being to the machine, rather than the other way around?” Ch 11
“…we have learned to regard ourselves as ghosts in the machine… we have more and more become mere ghosts in the machine” Ch 11
Quotable:
“an electronic New Jerusalem, its streets paved with silicon” Ch. 24 “Electronic Mysticism”
More to ponder:
“ancient man, much more than we, experienced himself rather like an like an embryo within a surrounding, nourishing cosmos… a plenum of wisdom and potency”
“the mythic surround was engaged in weaving the ancient mind, as in a dream”
“From Tolkein’s storyteller– who originates and remains one with his own mind– they have descended to mechanican tinkerer… just so far as we forget our ancient descent from a cosmos of wisdom above us– we lose the basis of creative mastery, an offer ourselves to be remade by the mechanisms below us”
“we are pursuing an experiment every bit as momentous as the discovery of mind at the dawning of western civilization– what manner of god will we be?”
Essential quote from Talbott’s The Future Does Not Compute:
“…what we have today is in some respects a seriously disabled consciousness, and… our own infatuation with machines is both a symptom of our disability and a further contributor to it.”
eA bouquet of bienvenidos for new readers of this blog in 2018. And as you long-time readers know, I post here at “Madam Mayo” blog on Mondays. For 2018, Monday is still the magic day, and every fourth Monday of the month will feature either a post on cyberflanerie or a Q & A with another writer, poet, and/or literary translator.
This first Q & A for 2018 is with crackerjack literary novelist, short story writer, and essayist Leslie Pietrzyk who has a new novel out this month, which I cannot wait to read. Silver Girl is the title, and it has already been garnering outstanding reviews, including a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. (For the unititiated, a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly is a B-Freaking-D for which, lest you own a wine shop, you do not have enough champagne.)
C.M. MAYO:You have been a consistently productive literary writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
LELSIE PIETRZYK: Oh, yes, yes, yes…I’m a sucker for that siren song of the online world. I’m not sure I’ve come up with the answer for maintaining focus, but sometimes I’ll try setting timers (say, no Facebook until two hours have passed) or working late at night (fewer people online to chat with). I don’t answer email on the weekends.
But what works better for me (unless I’m kidding myself), is that I’ve become more open to working WITH social media and the wide world of Google available while I’m writing. Why knock myself out trying to imagine the color of nail polishes in 1982 when I can simply Google for an answer and see an array before me? Why berate myself for dipping into Facebook for five minutes? Why not just accept that distractions are part of our world now and try to retrain myself to write deeply amidst them?
CM: Are you in a writing group? If so, can you talk about the members, the process, and the value for you?*
LP: For many years I was in an incredible, high-level writing group of 6 women who shared novels-in-progress…dear Madam Mayo belonged to this group! I think I learned how to write a novel from these monthly meetings.
When the group dissipated after 10 years, I was—honestly—tired of having critical voices in my head. Plus, I was in the beginning phases of putting together a story collection that was linked unconventionally, by incident (in each story, a young husband dies suddenly; the book became This Angel on My Chest). Because what I was doing was so difficult, and because I didn’t know how on earth I was going to make this premise work, and because I didn’t want to hear one word about my flailing, I decided that it was time for a different kind of group.
I started my neighborhood prompt writing group, and we meet once a month and write for 30 minutes to open-ended, one-word prompts. We can read out loud or not, and there are no critiques, only admiration. We’ve been meeting for more than 5 years now, and chunks of Silver Girl emerged from these meetings.
CM: Did you experience any blocks while writing this novel, and if so, how did you break through them?
LP: My biggest block actually came right at the beginning. I had been writing character sketches and scenes in my prompt group for at least eighteen months before I started the book in earnest, so I had all this material. My two college girl characters were dark and edgy and complicated, and I’d teased out a ton of fascinating history to their relationship. When I finally finished This Angel on My Chest I thought it would be a simple glide right into the new book…but I realized immediately that my complicated, interesting characters had no plot! It was a humbling moment.
I started doing more research into the Tylenol murders in the early 80s (which is the backdrop for the book) and focused on brainstorming potential connections between my girls and that event. I won’t say I ended up with an outline per se, but eventually I found a path for the book’s events. (Nor will I say that anything about writing this book was a “simple glide”!)
CM: Back to a digital question. At what point, if any, were you working on paper for this novel? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
LP: I never thought I’d say this, but paper was very important! I’m usually all-computer-all-the-time, but I’ve found that writing to prompts on paper feels freeing and takes my mind to riskier, more interesting places. So I wrote about Jess and the unnamed narrator many, many times across several little notebooks. The problematic parts came in trying to locate scenes I was sure I’d remembered writing, and when I had to type into the computer, a task I despise. Perhaps even more problematic is the constant fear that I’ll lose one of my notebooks to carelessness or fire before I transcribe its contents!
CM: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, or some combination?
LP: I’m far too disorganized to send a newsletter. Also, I retain enough Midwestern upbringing to wonder, who wants to hear from me? An email from a reader is always a fun surprise or a tweet…but I’m still loyal to Facebook. I generally post publically so anyone can follow me. I’ve actually come to know many readers and writers through my FB scroll. And for real old-school types, I’ve still got my literary blog!** I used to be very reliable about posting and am erratic now, but I hope the site still retains a scrap of personal flair: www.workinprogressinprogress.com
Email access is on my website (along with some of my favorite recipes): www.lesliepietrzyk.com
*CM: I too left our writing group, and for similar reasons. (I was about half way into an epic and epically complex historical novel, and after I got rolling with that, receiving critiques from other writers who were, of necessity, reading 30 pages out of context, was turning into more trouble than it was worth to me– and, to further complicate matters, I was transitioning to living in Mexico City again.) Nontheless I remain immensely grateful for members’ critiques of the beginning drafts of this novel, as well as of several other short stories and literary essays. And I miss the comraderie of those meetings with such excellent friends and esteemed colleagues. Those years for me personally, and for my writing, were a rare blessing.
**CM: For anyone interested in writing and publishing literary fiction, Leslie Pietrzyk’s Work-in-Progress blog is a read well worth your while.
File this post under Future Reminder to Take My
Own Advice, and if some or all of these ideas also work for you, gentle reader,
verily I say unto you: Wunderbar!
Late last September, having finally rearranged
and set up my working library in my new office in Mexico City– the work in
question being a book on Far
West Texas— I had to pack it all back up again and ship it
across the Atlantic. (Why? Well, that’s a novel I’m not going to write, both
literally and figuratively).
Now that I’ve got my Texas books resettled on
their second set of new shelves in less than six months, I’m ready to take on
2018! But whew, I’ve got biceps after this job for a Hercules. The
thirty-eight boxes of books comprising what I now call the Texas Bibliothek– I
have landed in German-speaking Switzerland– arrived in mid-January. And a
couple weeks later, every tome and paperback and pamphlet and back-issue of Cenizo Journal
is in place, and I can carry my bike over head! I could scoop up and toss
dessicated Christmas trees, small donkeys and their Schmutzlis
out windows, too, should I take a notion!
ON ORGANIZING (AND TWICE MOVING) A WORKING LIBRARY: Ten Lessons Learned of Late with the Texas Bibliothek
1. Organize the books by topic– not as a
librarian would recommend, but as your working writer’s mind finds most
apt.
Ideas About Texas (Some, Anyway…)
After all, you’re the one who will be using these
books, not the general public. And even in a fairly substantial working
library, such as this one, there are not enough books to justify the
bothernation of cataloging and labeling each and every title.
If you have more than 50 books and if you do not
organize them in some reasonably reasonable way, why don’t you just open your
front door and let your dogs wander out and then you can go looking for them on
the freeway at four a.m., that might be more fun!
2. If any category has more than 30-40 books,
create a new subcategory.
Because trying to keep books in alphabetic order,
whether by author or by title, makes me feel dehydrated, RRRRRR.
3. Label categories of books with large,
easy-to-read lettering.
Because if you’re a working writer, like me you’re probably near-sighted…
Funny how book designers always have such unique
ideas about colors and font sizes and typefaces…. In other words, I don’t
want to have to look at the visual clutter of those spines to try to figure out
what this bunch is about; I let that BIG FAT LABEL tell me.
If you do not want to make labels, why don’t you
peel the labels off all the jars and cans in your pantry, mix ’em up, and then
try to find which one is the dog food and which one the canned pumpkin? That
would be a mile more hilarious.
4. When moving, before touching anything,
take photos of the whole shebang.
I do not have early onset dementia, but boy
howdy, moving house sometimes makes me feel as if I do. (Did I used to have a
working library? Was I working on a book? What day is it? Is Ikea still open?)
5. Then, before even touching those books, take a tape measure and write down the inches of shelf space required for each and every category.
I suspect that these things are in cahoots with pens and umbrellas.
A tape measure!
I realize this may sound very OCD.
But three moves ago, it did not occur to me to do
this with my working collection on Mexico’s Second Empire / French
Intervention, for my then recently-published book, The Last Prince
of the Mexican Empire. In the rush of moving
I allowed the moving company crew to pack the books,
willynilly-fefifo-rama-chillydilly, and then, on arrival, lacking space, never
mind bookshelf space, and so having to leave that particular library in a
half-unpacked, unsorted chaos, for the next few years more correspondence and
related research was bottlenecked than I want to think about. (That library now
has its home in Mexico City– that would be another blog post.)
The main thing is, you want to be certain you
actually have the bookshelf space you need plus ample wiggle room for
each category before you start packing– and then double
check the available bookshelf space again before you start unpacking.
And never, ever let anyone else pack them.
Sounds obvious. Alas, for me, three moves ago, it
was not.
6. Save those neatly made shelf labels to
reattach to the new shelves, and also label– with mammoth, easy-to-read
fonts– each and every box.
Geology, Energy, Box 1 corresponded to category 40, requiring 17 inches of shelf space.
7. Number each box, e.g., 1 of 32; 2 of 32, etc.
These can be cross-referenced with the master
list of categories, which has the measurements.
8. Don’t be stingy with boxes!!
For moving books I prefer the so-called banker’s boxes
with punch-out holes for handles. Banker’s boxes are large enough to take a
heaping helping of books, and the handles make them easy to carry, however the
weight of a book-filled banker’s box remains within the range of what I, a
50-something female whose daily mainly workout consists of walking two pugs,
and, la-de-da, whatever biking and yoga, can easily haul up or down a staircase.
Yes, you could snag a batch of free boxes at the
grocery store, and yes, you probably could, as I certainly could, lift bigger
boxes with double the number of books in them– and most men can haul a stack
of two or even three bigger boxes at a time. However, whatever the upper-body
strength you have and shape you are in, when you are moving house, unless you
for some reason enjoy showering hundreds of dollars on, say, your
chiropractor’s vacation home, lifting huge, ultra-heavy, and unwieldy boxes is
penny wise and dollar dumb. Ox dumb.
Goodie for me, I learned this lesson three moves
ago, and I had an excellent chiropractor.
9. Take photos of the boxes, labels included.
Because you never know! Seems I have good moving
juju. Knock on wood for next time!
On reshelving day, gather together before commencing:
Papertowels
Cleaning spray for the shelves (they will be dusty)
If you are missing any one of these items, you will probably have to interrupt whatever you are doing to go get it, and then in, say, the kitchen, because you have Moving on the Brain, you will be distracted by some zombie command from the dusty ethers such as, I must now go to Ikea to buy garbage bags and whatnotsy whatnots…
#
Meanwhile, dagnabbit, people just won’t stop writing books on Texas!! Two more, post-move, essential additions to the Texas Bibliothek:
Wish me luck, gentle reader. I aim to finish my book on Far West Texas this year. By the way, I host an associated 24 podcast series, “Marfa Mondays,” which is woefully behind schedule because of these moves, but soon to resume. I invite you to listen in anytime to the 20 podcasts posted so far.
P.S. Using the free blogger platform, I also
maintain an online working
library of out-of-copyright (now in the public domain, mainly linked to
archive.org) Texas books— books which I could not or did not want
to attempt to purchase but would like to be able to consult at my
leisure. It includes a number of titles that might appear bizarrely out of
place (one is on Massachusetts, for example)– but after all, this is not for
the general public, but a working library in service of my book in-progress. I
mention this because perhaps you might find it of use to create such an online
library for your own purposes.
P.P.S. For those wondering, what is my take on
ebooks? First of all, I delightedly sell
them! And yes, I have bought some, and as far as the Texas
book research goes, when I need a book urgently and/or the paper edition is
unavailable or expensive, I have been known to download a Kindle or four– or,
as above-mentioned, download out-of-copyright books for free from www.archive.org and similar sites. I
appreciate that convenience, and also the ease with which I can search within a
text for a word or phrase. Nonetheless, on balance, I find ebooks decidedly
inferior to paper. Morever, I doubt that my electronic libraries will outlive me
in any meaningful way, while I expect that my working libraries of hardcovers
and paperbacks, including some rare
editions, may serve other researchers well beyond the horizon of my
lifetime.
As anounced in the last post of 2017, in 2018 I will be posting on Mondays on the following schedule:
First and third Mondays of the month: New writing / news / podcasts; Second Monday: For the writing workshop; Fourth Monday: Cyberflanerie and/or Q & A with another writer, poet, and/or translator; Fifth Monday, when applicable: Whatever strikes my gong.
Time snaps by. It is has been two days from a
year since Ann L.
McLaughlin passed away. How I miss my brave, graceful, and very wise
friend. Ann was a decade older than my mother but, curiously, that did not
occur to me until she had passed: There was something ageless about her. She
was a literary scholar and later, when I knew her, a writing teacher and an
artist, a novelist of the most seriously dedicated and generous of our kind.
I met Ann in, I think it was 1999, when, having just moved to the area, I read from my short story collection at the Writer’s Center, in Bethesda MD, just outside Washington DC; as a founding faculty and board member, Ann did me the honor of so welcomingly introducing me to that audience. Shortly thereafter, thanks to a good word from poet and Gargoyle editor and publisher extraordinaire, Richard Peabody, I joined a writing critique group. A crackerjack writing group it was! At various points it included Kate Blackwell, Susan Coll, Kathleen Currie, Katharine Davis, Solveig Eggerz, E.J. Levy, Carolyn Parkhurst, Leslie Pietrzyk, Amy Stolls, Paula Whyman, and Mary Kay Zuravleff, among others– and always, always Ann.
When I joined the writing group, Ann was known for her loosely autobiographical novels Sunset at Rosalie, The Balancing Pole, and Lightning in July. Of the latter, set in Boston polio epidemic of the 1950s, Publisher’s Weekly lauds her “straightforward narration that transforms the events of a prolonged hospital stay into a richly textured tale.”
“So deeply tragic. So tremendously sweet. Ann McLaughlin has captured humanity at its bravest. Artistic, accomplished Hally Blessing is stricken with polio in the prime of her youth, only weeks before the first polio vaccine. Within mere hours, Hally progreses from the elation of her first major venue as a young flautist to the despair of being diagnosed with polio. Ovecoming the deep challenges of fear and disfigurement, Hally struggles to find the inner resources which eventually enable her triumph. The scenes, the characters (even the minor characters) are all vividly portrayed. This work is a victory for the human spirit.”
At that time, Ann was out and about promoting Maiden Voyage, a coming-of-age novel set in the 1920s on a newspaper magnate’s yacht. From Mimi Godfrey’s review in the Women’s National Book Association newsletter:
“McLaughlin is a clear-eyed and observant writer, and her evocation of 1920s Washington and the exotic ports of Julia’s trip– Madeira, Alexandria, Sicily, Greece, Zanzibar, Singapore, the South Pacific– is fascinating. But McLaughlin is more interested in charting Julia’s mind and heart, offering a kind of artist-novel of her development as a journalist and fledgling photographer. Julia wrestles with questions that were as vital today as they were in 1924: What is more important for a woman, a satisfying career or marriage and a family? Do the demands of a woman’s work matter as much as a man’s? Julia’s answers to these questions are, even more than the itinerary, what give this engaging novel its lasting satisfaction.”
For our writing group, Ann brought in draft after
draft of chapters from The House on Q
Street, her novel set in Washington during World War
II. After The House on Q Street came A Trial in Summer, set
in Depression-era San Francisco.
And although no longer in the writing group, for
I’d returned to live in Mexico City, I had a chance to read drafts from Leaving Bayberry
House and the proofs for Amy & George.
I was honored to contribute a blurb for the latter, which takes the reader to
1930s Cambridge, Massachusetts:
“Once again, with charm and heart, McLaughlin brings to life a tumultuous period of U.S. history as she probes and delves into a father-daughter relationship that is sometimes a seesaw, sometimes a dance. This is a wise novel.”
“George is dean of the Harvard Law School and Amy is his young, sensitive daughter. McLaughlin’s skill at portraying the quiet dangers of family life which culminate in an act of violence is tempered by a generosity of spirit and disarming honesty.”
As a member of her writing group I had a direct
window into the effort it took to write these books. I was, and remain, in awe
of Ann’s discipline. No matter what, and there were whats aplenty, Ann could
sit herself down in the chair every day, fire up the laptop, and do the work.
She had a truly rare dedication to craftsmanship, faith in her vision, and, at
the same time, the willingness and sheer grit to rewrite, and rewrite again,
and again, and again and, Lordy! as her characters often said, again.
And then whenever one of her books was
published– this is especially hard for shy creatures such as writers, and no
easy feat for one with health challenges– Ann would get herself out there, she
sent the postcards, kept up with the torrents of emails, and with smiling
aplomb, did the many rounds of readings and signings for her books. Her book
signings at Washington DC’s Politics & Prose– one of the last and most
prestigious of the great independent bookstores– were always packed, every
chair taken, fans standing in the aisles.
Among the many events for her novel A Trial in Summer was a party at my apartment. Somehow, my memory of that conflates with another party, for Mary Kay Zuravleff’s The Bowl is Already Broken, when Ann’s husband Charlie, an esteemed historian, was still alive. He was in a motorized scooter, but he had such joie de vivre, that scooter might have been a whim of a contraption for floating out of Oz. The picture I hold most vividly in my mind is of Charlie parked in the middle of that broad room, beaming, surrounded by so many, many of his and Ann’s adoring friends.
A few years after I had returned to live Mexico
City, it seemed there might be a chance on the horizon to come back to DC and
so, under the wing of Ann’s encouragement and endorsement, I joined the board
of the Writer’s Center. That turned out to be a short-lived commitment on my
part, alas, but what I remember so warmly– what magical moments!– was sitting
at the table in her kitchen in Chevy Chase, petting her cat pretty Booska,
while just the two of us talked writing and teaching writing and what we could
do for that beloved literary oasis.
At the Writer’s Center Ann’s workshops were legendary. Novelist Frank S. Joseph told me, “Ann was the best writing instructor I ever had.”
Year after year Ann gave her students her all plus ten. I knew, from our many conversations, how much they meant to her. In most people’s minds “Washington DC” does not conjure images of literary community, but the fact is, the Writer’s Center is one of the largest literary centers in the United States, and the capital and surrounding area, deep into Maryland, Virginia and even Delaware, is filled with writers who, at some point, took one, two, or several of Ann’s workshops.
Even in her last months, her health failing,
whilst in and out of hospitals, Ann kept on writing. She finished her ninth
novel, The Triangle,
and reviewed the page proofs. Her publisher, John Daniel, describes it thus:
“The Triangle returns to Boston’s 1955 polio epidemic, and combines the theme of coping with disability with that of struggle in the father-daughter friction and frustrated love. The author seems to have written the satisfying resolution to the two overlapping conflicts in her fictive life. This powerful novel is a satisfying finale of a brilliant career.”
Ann McLaughlin died at home on December 20, 2016.
I am but one of a multitude of people who can say
that Ann enriched my life, both as a person and as an artist, immeasurably. Yet
how fleeting the time I had with her, after all. Why did I not take one of her
workshops? Why did I not ask Ann more about her friend and correspondent, John
Updike, or about Janet Lewis, author of The Wife of Martin Guerre, whom
she knew from her years in California? And I regret immensely that we did not
talk more, in the most writerly vein, as we so easily might have, about the
novels of Virginia Woolf, which she surely knew by heart, every one.
I will miss Ann for the rest of my life. Her novels, a treasure of a consolation, will always have a special place here by my desk in my writing room, and in my heart.
Ann L. McLaughlin and C.M. Mayo, Washington DC, 2007 Photo by Alice J Mansell
Washington Post, January 1, 2017
ANN LANDIS McLAUGHLIN
Died at her home in Chevy Chase, MD on Tuesday, December 20, 2016 after a brief respiratory illness.
The daughter of James M. Landis and Stella McGehee Landis, she was born in 1928 and grew up in Cambridge, MA. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1952 and received a PhD in literature from American University in 1978. Mrs. McLaughlin began teaching several courses every year at the Writers’ Center in Bethesda when it was founded in 1976 and continued teaching until the last year of her life; she also served on the board there. She had fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and the Studios of Key West.
Ann was the author of eight novels, all published by John Daniel and Co., and recently finished correcting the final proofs on her ninth, to be published in 2017. Her readers were particularly drawn to her portraits of girls and young women coming of age, often in Depression-era America. She wrote with feeling of the intricacy of relationships those between sisters and particularly those between daughters and their difficult, if brilliant fathers. Her long and happy marriage to Charles C. McLaughlin, professor of history and editor of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, ended with his death in 2005.
She overcame many challenges, including polio, which she and her husband both contracted during the 1955 epidemic in Boston, which principally affected her speech and swallowing for the rest of her life. But her temperament was remarkably buoyant in the face of adversity and she will be remembered as one of the strongest and kindest of women. She will be missed by generations of students, her family and a wide community of friends and colleagues who were inspired by her gallant, bright spirit, her humor, her gentle wisdom, and her warmth.
She is survived by her sister, Ellen McKee; children, John C. McLaughlin and Ellen M. McLaughlin; and two grandchildren, Rachel and Aaron McLaughlin.
