Setting: A narrow, gas-lit, cobblestone alley. Shadows. Dusk or dawn, as you will. The late nineteenth century, perhaps earlier.
Dramatis Personae: Mark, Mark, Mark, Jean, Jean, and David.
Motivation: Each of the three Marks has pledged his troth to one of the two Jeans’ three sisters, oaths given in all solemnity and with all due expectation of consummation, but, alas, in acts of the most despicable gallantry, two of those three Marks have each impregnated one of the other, unpromised, Jean’s sisters before the wedding banns could even be announced. David acts in this scandalous commerce as second for a fourth, absent, Mark, who, because he shares the name (though never the inclinations) of the more infamous Marks, fears confusion may result among his fellow parishioners and therefore wants to clear his name of any possible association with the sordid, unseemly, immoral affairs of his namesakes, in whatever fashion proves most expedient and most discreet.
This was the original film, not the more recent one, which I suspect would be less engaging.
Afterward talked with Tracy about changes in how film is made, actors are trained and cultivated, norms of delivery and characterization. Actors like Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder seem to me to have been phased out, in part I think because they are by today’s standards too “stagey.” Stagey in general seems to mean broad, obviously affected, self-consciously performative, and etc. In film, in prose, in poetry, even in theater itself, the performer who acknowledges his/her own performance is thoroughly out of style, and probably understood by the majority to be hackneyed, flat, boring, and etc. The impressive thing about Mostel is that though his body is in some sense repulsive (especially in said film, wherein his comb-over was so terrifying they really had to give him a hat once we were supposed to like him) he exercises such perfect control over it. The man can clearly dance, sing, project, etc. And this is (or would be) today his greatest sin, especially because controlling your body is now supposed to mean training it to be beautiful, or at least sexually provocative.
But manner has been surgically removed from film (though not, I think, television). Daniel Day Lewis is understood to chew the scenery, perhaps excessively. There are few other actors who approach his affection for mannered performances, unfortunately — Crispin Glover has his moments, as does the current model of Bill Murray. Jack Black isn’t too far off, but is usually wasted (mostly his own fault). His performance was the main reason to watch King Kong, because he understood he was in a broad, broad movie about a giant ape fighting dinosaurs and fighter planes. Women are I think generally allowed to be closer to this model because it is generally understood that women spend most of their lives performing, while men are understood to spend more time existing unselfconsciously. Well bullshit, of course.
At its root, the rebellion against manner in performance (and writing, and music, and everywhere) seems to be at heart about flattering humanity, rather than describing it. The mannered performance is not acceptable in any medium today because we have a myth of human authenticity underlying our art. Any person in any scene or passage is meant to be first and foremost a genuine human being, meaning A) one with depth and complexity and secrets, and B) someone like YOU. Which is mainly a way of saying that YOU have depth and complexity and secrets, when I think we both know that is a damn lie: a human being is not complicated except insofar as it contrives to be so. It used to be understood in general, I think, that a character in a scene should be fundamentally motivated by one of several basic impulses: hunger, greed, or lust. That’s what it is to have a mouth and hands, and if you can’t find those impulses in everything you do it’s only because Hollywood and Nicholas Sparks or whatever have been kind enough to disguise, if only thinly, your needs: to convince you that you don’t have a body, not really, or that you are at least not beholden to it. Today we invest absolutely in ideology (idolatry) in order to forget our real needs and wants, which is a political convenience/disaster as well as an interpersonal one.
The ironic part is that in attempting to flatter our humanity, we in fact destroy it in every portrayal. We do not like Zero Mostel’s song and dance because it seemed to acknowledge the camera — we would today reject Gene Wilder’s “muggy” performance style because the only reason to mug is if there’s somebody watching. How could he always angle those beautiful blue eyes just so without knowing where the camera was? But of course there is someone watching, not only in film but in our own lives, and we are indeed mugging constantly for our own audience — we sing and dance too. What frightens us is the presentation of artifice as genuinely human, which it is. But of course an actor or a writer without artifice is crippled. In modern writing the goal seems to be to write as if you don’t know there is a reader, to have a hand so gentle it is invisible — to create the impression the object has washed up on the shore, unexplained, and may disappear soon. But how are we to create the most powerful and resonant effects in our readers without tipping our hands? How can we write well without letting on that we are writing?
A character in a movie who is forbidden from playing to the camera is a cripple in a fairly literal sense: the screen and speakers being his body, he is told not to acknowledge that he has one, and so he must stand limply on screen, mumbling listlessly and pathetic. Sometimes it is appropriate to cripple our characters in this way. After all I am not an expert in my body either, and probably neither are you. And so we are alienated by self-conscious performances at once because they are too bad, and too good. Most of the time, though, I think the best characters in any form are at some level aware of their existence within that form — not so much as to destroy the illusion, but with the understanding that the illusion is not so fragile.
Perhaps another way to say this, because I feel I have been circling my point, is that the greatest irony of naturalistic art is that it renders its human subjects unnatural. The actor who cannot acknowledge he’s acting is alien to his own film: the flowers have all been arranged to their best advantage, and so have all the other objects, and so have even the secondary characters, most likely. The leading man and lady, however, cannot admit to be what they are; they must waltz clumsily through the otherwise immaculate set. A prose character whose fumbling dialogue stands in too-stark contrast to the careful, pointed prose seems at root to be speaking another language, because he is. He does not belong in this book. It may be that we prefer alienated characters because we want to believe that we are ourselves alienated from our own surroundings, that we are unnatural ourselves — or rather supernatural. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, by belonging unambiguously on film, imply that we might belong where we are, which is embarrassing and painful to contemplate. Better to be clumsy angels than lovely dancers all full of need and malice.
I get perhaps unreasonably frustrated with online magazines that sort their contents alphabetically by author name. In cases where you’re archiving your print edition, which is the primary version, I get it. But in most other cases it gives me a really bad vibe. It says two things to me:
1) The editors of this magazine do not see their job as creating a whole and satisfying experience. Arranging the work they publish in order that each piece compliments the other pieces is too much work.
2) The editors are more concerned with their own social advancement than the quality of the magazine — they see themselves as part of a “scene” first, and editors second. The reason it feels this way is that alphabetical organization is a political strategy to abdicate responsibility; Zelda Zabadoo can’t complain if she’s placed after Aaron Ackerman. It’s the alphabet’s fault, not the editor’s. So everyone can stay happy and they can all be part of the club.
One could argue that arrangement doesn’t really matter in online magazines, where readers rarely read from “beginning” to “end” anyway, and indeed where the concepts have very little meaning. This doesn’t pass the smell test. If arrangement doesn’t matter, then a script should be written to randomize the order of pieces, or there should be one canonical order drawn from a hat. If order doesn’t matter, then you might as well arrange it all somehow anyway — why not? The only reason to sort alphabetically is to pointedly and demonstrably *not* sort, to avoid being seen to play favorites, etc. It’s bullshit.
In short, it’s editors telling me they don’t really want to be editors. This is not uncommon among editors, who are usually writers as well — but it’s frustrating. And of course at this point it seems the majority have agreed that this is the way to do things, so it doesn’t actually mean anything of the sort. It only turns me off (and perhaps it really is only me who is bothered by this).
Most online publications also seem to feel that each genre should be cordoned off from the others, listed in their own boxes, columns, or pages. This makes more sense to me, because many readers will legitimately want to read some categories but not others. Certainly I am sometimes in the mood for poetry, sometimes fiction, and almost never flash (vile “flash”). However I think ultimately that I would like to see more people experiment with actually designating an order in which things should be read. Sometimes the order of a magazine helps me to appreciate its contents, and to be open and engaged. Editors should be editors — they should arrange their work such that readers understand why it is in one place all together, rather than many places apart.
So here are two ideas for text adventures that I’ve had.
Several years ago I wanted to write a game about a character called Mr. Hand. Mr. Hand was an eccentric millionaire giant walking hand with a head on its wrist. He liked to kidnap people, drop them into a dungeon, and then make them lead him around on a leash, solving problems. No I do not know why I thought this would be fun. Yes I still kind of want to do it.
Here is a better idea:
The game is about making people happy. It does not matter how you do this. You have the power to rename any noun in the game — in other words, you can make a key a door, and you can make a dog a present, and you can make a frog a golden egg, and so on. I don’t know how this would work exactly — I mean, I know enough about programming that I know this would be utterly simple in general, but text adventures are generally built in specialized languages or platforms that might not have the right features.
Anyway, all of the characters you meet are sad, and they need something to be happy. If you ask them about themselves you can learn about them as people and get clues as to why they are unhappy, and then you can rename various objects and give them those objects and if you have selected the right name they will be happy, because as far as they know they will have the thing they need to be happy.
So for instance say someone lost his dog Sparky when he was a kid. You could solve this by giving him a “dog,” but you might also solve it by giving him “Sparky.”
Another character might need “The Peace that Passeth Understanding” or “the presidency” or “his soul mate” or “a message from God.” You could make any character happy by giving them “true happiness.” You might also make them happy by giving them “a million dollars” or “penile enhancement,” though the game would suggest that this happiness was fleeting, at least in some cases. Although perhaps we would all be happier with bigger junk, in a lasting and authentic way.
That’s all right, he said. He drank a lot of the drink. She’s probably right. It’s not a bad thing to know–if you’ve use of your hands. I was tied up the whole time, so it wouldn’t have helped.
Except when you played chess, I said.
No, I was tied up then too. He made my moves for me. Sometimes he’d deliberately move a piece ot the wrong square and pretend not to understand if I objected. You wouldn’t have thought I’d have cared, with everything else, but it made me absolutely furious. I’d refuse to play, and he’d beat me. Or he’d beat me if he lost. He didn’t beat me if he beat me.
He said
He was kind of split up. He’d be quite friendly when he brought out the board, and he’d smile. That would last for a few moves and then sometimes he’d start to cheat, and sometimes he’d lose his temper and hit me with the gun, and sometimes. The friendliness was the horrible part, because he’d be hurt, genuinely hurt, when I wasn’t pleased to see him or took offence because he’d beat the shit out of me the day before. And now that I’m back that’s all I see. That horrible friendliness everywhere.
This is what professional actors do so well. Professional actors say when they are acting they literally become the character they are playing. So if an actor named Charlie Robeertson is playing a military policeman Charlie Robertson becomes an MP on stage in front of the audience. There is no Charlie Robertson on stage during the performance is another way of saying it. A skilled actor can convince an audience of this every time, and if the hypothetical Charlie Robertson is a skilled actor then we can assume the audience believes he is actually a military policeman on that stage during the performance. What happens to Charlie Robertson during this time we don’t know. We don’t know where he goes or what he does when he gets there.
In some ways it is like death it is like what happens to you when you die.
In this way you could call actors killers. You could say that acting is a kind of killing which it certainly is.
“You may sneer,” said Neary, “and you may scoff, but the fact remains that all is dross, for the moment at any rate, that is not Miss Dwyer. The one closed figure in the waste without form, and void! My tetrakyt!”
Of such was Neary’s love for Miss Dwyer, who loved a Flight-Lieutenant Elliman, who loved a Miss Farren of Ringsakiddy, who loved a Father Fitt of Ballinclashet, who in all sincerity was bound to acknowledge a certain vocation for a Mrs. West of Passage, who loved Neary.
“Love requited,” said Neary, “is a short circuit,” a ball that gave rise to a sparkling rally.
“The love that lifts up its eyes,” said Neary, “being in torments; that craves for the tip of her little finger, dipped in lacquer, to cool its tongue–is foreign to you, Murphy, I take it.”
It is important to read outside yourself to have new ideas and feelings and write down good words. I know this all the time but I do not feel it all the time — sometimes I feel very bad about reading, because I have been a student for five and a half years, and before that I was an autodidact, and I read much more before school because I got to choose what I would read. When teachers choose what I read the results can be mixed. Sometimes I successfully humble myself before their collective wisdom and find a way to convince myself it is worth my time to read their favorite books, and the canon. Sometimes I am not successful in this and I can find no real merit in the stories and I feel very resentful of the way they so blithely waste my time on what reads to me as utter garbage. Whether I humble myself or not I have learned they will berate me for not using my scarce private reading time to absorb their other favorites, which are even more important than these favorites and thus I should already have read. You can see how this might sour a person on the pursuit more generally, and indeed I continue to believe that this sort of pig-headedness is precisely what sours most people on reading in general.
(And when do they offer themselves up to be berated for not knowing who Stanislaw Lem is, or for not reading my other favorite authors? Why don’t they all know Kelly Link, and when are they planning to fix it?)
Anyway, I have been doing better about remembering and wanting to read for myself, I think because finally it was that or belch up my guts. And this is why I’m glad David McLendon has been kind enough to post so much as the new and monstrousUnsaid online — I can direct you to Brian Evenson’s story “The Second Boy.” Evenson is one of the most important sources of new words in my life right now, and this story in particular nourishes.
Here is an excerpt:
There were around him other trees as well, he soon found, encountering one and then another and then a third. He struggled his lighter out of his pocket and watched his gloved fingers try to flick it alight, was surprised that they finally managed. He cupped the flame with one hand and saw below him nearly bare ground, almost no snow: a matrix of pine needles and dead vegetation and mud spidered through with veins of frost.
He prodded the ground with the toe of his boot. Some places it remained hard, like a single consistent organism. In others it came slowly apart, the ice not strong enough to hold the dead leaves and other matter together.
He kept at it until he found a large spot that was loose and mostly dry, the leaves and needles such that he could push them together into a heap with his boot. From there it was little enough to bring the lighter down among the needles and leaves until they smoldered and, crackling, caught flame. He kept uprooting needles and leaves and adding them to the fire until the flames were high enough for him to start stripping bark off the nearest trees.
The underside of the bark was threaded with worm trails. It was also studded with black blotches which, as the bark caught fire, began to unfurl and move, becoming small black vermin that spun madly about before sizzling away. Unless it was just that he was seeing things, parts of his brain going dim and dying from the cold. He tried not to think about this, carefully feeding bigger and bigger chunks of wood onto the fire until he had a roaring blaze.
I understand that in AA, the first step is admitting that you have a problem. After a couple of steps about finding God and letting Him take over your life comes step five: admitting to others (and God) what wrongs you’ve done in the past. I’m going to go straight from steps one to five tonight.
Step one: I have neglected this blog. I have thought of it often, promising posts to myself and others, including my wife, but I have failed to write these posts, and I am ashamed of what I have done, and how I must look to these others, including my wife.
Step five: God, readers, I am sorry for my neglect. I have neglected this blog because I am getting an MFA, and because my last semester was from Hell. It was consensual, of course, but so many of the most painful things are. I was teaching a new class designed entirely by me, for one thing, but (apart from one element I shan’t discuss in public) that was not so bad. I was also in the fiction workshop, of course, which was probably the worst workshop I have been in yet, but that is not uncommon; many workshops seem, as they unfold, to be the worst. And it is sacred (always sacred) to read, and to be read.
I was writing a play. It was a short play, but I wrote it over many times. (I am not done, but I saw it rehearsed publicly performed, which is *similar* to being done; I am reluctant to reclaim it from our collaboration and put it back inside me.)
I was also in a class where we wrote one story, at least nine pages, every week. Of course these stories were all more or less awful but they took a long time to squeeze out, as a general rule. And then there was the charity event I helped to assemble, and the magazine I helped to run. And have you seen how beautiful above-mentioned bride? These things take *time,* my dears, my God.
But (baby) I can be better. I can post twice daily, or thereabouts. I can tell you what I am reading. I can change! I’ll show you. I’ll start tonight.
How have you been? Was it cold? Did you have a YouTube you wanted to show me? Tell me of your holidays.
Right now I own one pair of pants without crotch holes. Why? Because I am poor. And I have a destructive crotch.
This means I have bought 0 lit mags in the past whenever, and not as many books as I like. I still manage to read some, of course — I’m in an MFA, they are around — but I haven’t bought any.
The consensus of the lit mag community, especially its editors, is that I should therefore refrain from submitting to them.
Which is another way of saying poor people need not apply to be writers.
Why should I have to buy my way in? You’ll get my money the second I have some to spare, guys. Honest.
I clicked a link to the post-humous David Foster Wallace excerpt and I didn’t expect to enjoy it because the truth is I haven’t yet really enjoyed a DFW fiction. Nonfiction yes, fiction no. I read about 8% of Infinite Jest, realized I had no idea what was going on, and gave up. (I recognize that this is my problem, and intend to go back and fix it someday.)
Anyway when I clicked over to the tab and saw his name and the story’s first words it sort of took my breath away and my heart hurt. I am not sure why. I was not very upset when he died, because I don’t really get upset about individual deaths, which are normal and regular. Even people I know, most of the time. Someone said he had committed suicide, and I thought what I usually think, which is something like, “That makes sense.” But this morning I am up too early because the wind was too loud, and I am sad that David Foster Wallace killed himself. I think more because I know now in a way I did not know then what he meant to other people I respect and love and admire — he knew and cared for several people in my program, and they cared for him.
I don’t think I have time to read the book just yet, but I think educators in general should be familiar with the authors’ conclusions, which are apparently somewhat summarized in this op-ed at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
This is what happens when I read McArdle on health care. I want to leave, and then she writes something so profoundly stupid that “unbelievably retarded” doesn’t begin to cover it:
I don’t see how you even could argue that this bill will cost less than Medicare Part D.
But, um, Medicare Part D was and is financed entirely with deficit spending. Health care reform is deficit neutral in the short term and aims to stay that way in the long term.
She waves away this seemingly elementary point with the following:
Yes, yes, Obama says he’ll pay for it.
Oh. Well then. I guess you’ve proven he won’t.
Whereas Bush didn’t say he’d pay for it, and then didn’t pay for it, which…
Megan McArdle seems to be pretty thrilled that ACORN has seen scandals that may mean its end. I don’t seem to remember her taking the same sort of pleasure in Merck’s problems after Vioxx, which would have eventually killed me had I continued taking it, but then, Merck wasn’t about advocating for the poor, was it?
Like any big organization, ACORN will surely have its problems. Organizations meant to help the poor are especially likely to be problematic, as A) they are usually poor themselves, and B) the poor are easy to take advantage of, and will attract all sorts of predatory behavior. So if we require these organizations to be pure as the driven snow at all times, we will be effectively agreeing that the poor shall never have advocates. But then, that’s hardly surprising coming from a libertatian, isn’t it? When your ideology is all about killing unions and removing consumer protections and repealing labor laws and making sure the rich get to keep every red cent of “their” money, you’ve effectively signed onto the “fuck the poor” platform any way you look at it.
For the record, ACORN does important work in my community, which is said to be the poorest county to support a university in the entire country. They help students and other impoverished people with their taxes, they register people for voting who might otherwise not vote, and they help educate people who desperately need it regarding their rights and responsibilities relating to the government, among many other vital services. Fundamentally what seems to bother conservatives about organizations like ACORN, insofar as we assume it isn’t the “yucky poor people” thing, is that they often seem to be advocating for Democratic causes: health care reform, labor law reform, and etc. But when Tracy and I visited, they didn’t really feel like an organ of the Democratic party. They were pushing for living wage provisions the DNC has never supported, and were far more comfortable helping immigrants than the establishment left will likely ever be. To the extent that they seem to be aligned with Democratic politics, it seems largely to be the result of Democrats being moderately more helpful to the poor than Republicans. When aligning yourself with the poor necessarily means helping the Democratic party, that ought to give conservatives pause.
Somehow, though, I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Proxy wars about genre are still going on at the Giant and other places, so naturally I want to revisit the concept myself and say a little more.
Given literary fiction’s position of privilege among writers and academia and so on, I think it’s worth noting briefly that this is a historical aberration. (I’m sure this point had been made plenty, but let’s rehearse it for a moment and see where it leads.) Most of the recorded human stories have been fantasies. Fantasies about Anansi, fantasies about Thor and Odin, fantasies about Wolf and Coyote — fantasies. To be sure, fantasy then was different from fantasy now, but it was still largely about impossible things. Even the nominally realist stories of a few centuries past weren’t really tied to reality as we understand it today: they were gory entertainments about royalty, often in countries that didn’t exist, or at least not in any forms like those they took in the stories. (See: Hamlet and King Lear, ferinstance.) While it’s possible the populace of the time was so naive as to find these stories credible, I have my doubts. They were adventures, pageants, grotesques.
We often “forgive” the fantasies of the past by dismissing them as allegorical. Anansi isn’t fiction because he wasn’t meant to be taken literally. He was about how it felt to be hungry. He was about survival. He was about storytelling. He was about anything except a fuckin’ cool spider guy trickster motherfucker. Well, you know, bullshit. And at the same time, of course. Nothing is strictly about what it’s about. We all know 1984 is about totalitarianism. We all know Star Trek is about WWII, or sometimes the Cold War, or sometimes other stuff. But it’s always allegorical if you want it to be. Everything is. And at the same time it’s awfully condescending to our ancestors to pretend that the stories and characters they loved were only allegory. Of course they weren’t.
Now I think that literary fiction and psychological realism and so on are great, and I’m glad they happened and continue to happen. I draw on them a lot in my writing. I think you have to these days, you have to work with at least an awareness. But at the same time, the privileging of the psychological realist literary story is, if a reasonable response to the lives we live now, still very much historically contingent. The most important, most enduring stories are myths, which are, at their hearts, genre fiction. This is not to say that genre is the most important, or wins. I wouldn’t know what that means. It’s only a way of suggesting that a little perspective on storytelling should also bring a lot of humility to literary writers. We’ve had a long, exciting period of literary writing. But other genres will get their turn too, as they should.
And, as a final thought on which I may expand later, it’s worth looking at the canon and thinking on how much of it has elements of genre. Right now, thinking on it, I have to say it seems like the majority. But I’ll need to consider that further. And, in any case, fuck the canon.
I don’t think I need to tell long-time readers what I think of this NYT story on a teacher who lets her students choose their reading: she’s doing the right thing. I’ve long advocated for this approach for a number of reasons. In brief: I don’t think most of the books we make students read are actually very good. But put that aside if you disagree. Regardless of our respective opinions on books like Heart of Darkness, we know that most students hate them. And why shouldn’t they? These books were written for adults — and not just adults, but adults from a totally different time period with totally different ideas about everything. Oh, and nearly all of the writers in question are white, and also male, which at this point I think even very young students (rightly) find suspicious.
Under the circumstances, the very least we can do is to try and choose books more appropriate to their age, this time, and demographics. (No, it is not insulting to make sure your Hispanic students get books by Hispanic writers, or your black students likewise, unless you believe there are no truly great Hispanic or black writers available for you to teach.) But once we’ve accepted that the premise that everyone should have to read the same ten books is false, I don’t see what’s stopping us from letting them choose for themselves.
Like the teacher in said story, I would certainly want to press students to choose reading of high complexity, good moral value (i.e., writing that encourages the development of sympathetic faculties), and real literary merit. I wouldn’t want to have them waste much of their time on dross either, not because dross should never be read — it should — but because that’s not what education is for. But there are many, many eminently workable solutions to such problems. Why not simply make a giant list of acceptable books? Why not mix elective reading with a few essential texts? You could force everyone on the planet to read Moby Dick as long as you leave them some time to read things they might more plausibly enjoy.
Declining readership is (as Yglesias writes) partly an inevitable result of technological and social change, and not even one I find especially worrisome. However, to the extent that such declines are preventable, I think many people stop reading simply because school teaches them it’s not fun or interesting. If reading is enjoyable, people will very clearly still do it. If it’s not, we have ourselves to blame as writers and teachers, and we should do better, rather than weep and beg for further “support” from the public, as if they owed us anything.
Kevin Drum has the most reasonable objection I’ve seen to my basic perspective on this:
This whole debate seems odd to me because it conflates two different things. In earlier grades, say 1-8 or so, we’re teaching reading. Within reason, letting kids pick books they’re personally attracted to seems like a good approach since it’s more likely to keep them interested in reading for its own sake.
But in later grades we’re introducing them to the literary canon, and that’s where it becomes more appropriate for teachers to pick the books. American Literature is a subject, just like history or chemistry, and an expert in the subject ought to choose the reading list.
I do very much like when people agree that literature is really a subject for diligent study like all the others, and it tickles my authoritarian impulses to suggest that this justifies forcing high school students to read what I think is good lit. But of course then I remember how I’m such a rebel and I hate the canon, so I end up split on the issue. At the end of the day I think the solution I proposed above is a good one: if we’ve got to cram a few classics down their throats, very well. We can do that. We’ve just got to make sure we’re giving them at least equal time to read what they want. I’ve yet to see a good argument against it that doesn’t begin with the assumption that if we don’t all read the same thirty great books from the past, the culture will collapse.
I’ve been struggling to find a word processing program that feels right to me. Perhaps the Internet can help!
My quest started a week back when someone mentioned at a party that he liked a program called Scrivener. Scrivener is a program for macs that lets you have “projects” instead of single-document files, so that you can have several documents open in the same window and switch between them on the fly. Think tabbed browsing but for word processors.
Now the truth is I have no real interest in that feature. I have never once thought to myself, “I wish I could have both of these stories open in the same window,” because I don’t know why that would be useful. The sales pitch they offer has something to do with research, which makes a little more sense, but they also seem to think that creative writing types especially will have a use for this software, and I can’t say why. The reason I decided to give it a shot was a lot less fancy: NeoOffice, my current program, is too slow. As in, there are times it makes my computer so unmanageably sluggish that I have to restart the whole system, and in general there is often a lag between my hitting a key and the letter/symbol showing up on the page. I use NeoOffice anyway because A) it’s free, B) it exports and imports .doc files pretty seamlessly, and C) it looks like I want my word processors to look, which is to say that it divides documents up into pages and shows me what they’ll look like when I print them.
C is in some ways the most important feature. Partly because I do sometimes write stories with fancy formatting meant to utilize the page, and partly because even traditional writing for me requires a real awareness of white space and relative paragraph length, I can’t really make myself write until I can see, in real time, what it would look like on an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper. And though Scrivener is much faster than NeoOffice (at least so far) and it opens and exports .doc files, it doesn’t seem to have a view that lets me know how things will print. (If it turns out I am wrong about this I’ll be very grateful.) This turns out to be a deal breaker.
So then I tried Mellel. Mellel is also quite fast, also imports and exports .doc files (though not seamlessly by any means — a bit of a problem) and can in fact show me what a page will look like. It even has a pretty great interface. My problems with Mellel are A) no spell check, B) weird formatting decisions, and C) it wants to break any word in half should it have the misfortune of ending a line. I have seen words divided by hyphens where no man should see such things.
So where does this leave me? I’ve heard good things about LaTeX (or wherever they keep their CAPs now), but also bad things: I’m skeptical, in short. What other affordable/free programs are out there? Am I stuck crawling along the ocean floor with NeoOffice, and hoping the next version is fast enough to use?
I’m reading Joyce’s Dubliner’s for class, and I guess I’ll admit at the outset that I find it pretty boring. I recognize the canonical selections as great, particularly “The Dead,” (”Araby” is a little dull but I like the way it closes) but ultimately we’re sort of well past the point where these stories can be felt as they were at the time. These stories have been so thoroughly digested, processed, and employed in pastiche that at this point the innovations are the bits that feel most stale. I don’t really blame myself for not being able to get into the right frame of mind, nor do I think much of those who will guilt you for not feeling or thinking what you are supposed to feel or think when you read various canonically great fiction. Without re-litigating arguments from elsewhere and other times too extensively, I’d like to suggest (again) that there is enough truly great fiction in this world that none of us can ever read or like all of it, and so the thing to do is to read what catches your interest (or what you are assigned) and makes your body hum, and leave the rest for others.
Anyway, when I feel this way about a classic I do feel sort of guilty, in spite of my best intentions not to. I mine the text as best I can for tricks, secrets, glimmers. In Dubliners the main thing I’m noticing is the power of the vast field of white space at the end of a story to put pressure on what text remains. What I had forgotten was that the stories in this book are really fairly brief — not flash fiction, not short-shorts, but fewer pages than the average short story. We get a brief sketch of a person’s life as captured in a key moment and then the great big wall of white paper ascends, as curtains descend, to end our time with them. This has an interesting effect.
At the outset of these stories — which are, of course, told in very plain language, and usually without much in the way of drama — I often find myself feeling as if I’m in the middle of the setup for the real story, which is, presumably, just around the corner. (Mainly this is due to the lack of especially distinct scenes — raised as I have been in this profane age of sensory engagement and electrical turbines, I never really quite believe that any story from before, say, 1940 has really started until it’s over: I’m waiting to see something.) Then I get to the last pair of pages and realize that whatever I’m reading now is in fact the action of the story — the drama at its heights. And in fact we are nearing the finale, and then I will be removed from this story and begin another. There is a kind of death coming, a void rushing at the story, and me. Everything becomes more significant. And there is pressure on each sentence to provide some closure, something that I can take with me. As would happen, I imagine, at the end of the world (if this is not it), everything becomes more poignant and heavy. And at the same time it seems to move faster, because I know precisely what is left. Now there is half a page. Now there is a quarter. Now there is an eighth.
Really this is pretty obvious, I guess. And certainly, looking back, I realize that I have (sometimes) accounted for this in my writing, and depended on it, and felt it in the conclusions of my stories. But it’s something I plan to look at more closely in future reading. Chapters within a book have a similar effect as they end, I think, but less so — we will not probably be removed from the characters, but rather moved to a different point in their lives. And there is also a weaker version of this at work in the white space between sections in novels and stories — a formal explanation for the power of Vonnegut’s tendency to divide his novels into many little fragments. (And also an example of how you can go too far with white space — I found Cat’s Cradle very difficult to read because at that point he was still using proper chapters where he should have been using breaks, which created in me a sort of mucky feeling of disassociation from the story, because there would be all this white space telling me we were moving in space or time, and then the words would tell me we were in the same place, the same time, the same damn scene, and even conversation. It felt like drinking in the afternoon.)
Didn’t know this until just now, but apparently about 17 days ago my story “Brother” was nominated by Mud Luscious Press for the Dzanc Best of Web series.
So that’s pretty cool. Thanks to J.A. Tyler, and wish me luck.