Monty Python as Self-Help, Lesson One: How NOT To Not Be Seen

Monty Python's "How Not To Be Seen" is a satire of 60s-era, government-produced educational films, which have their corollaries here in the U.S.



However, as an American, I am bound to derive a simple moral lesson from this absurdist sketch. And so I choose: Do Not Be Afraid.

OK, in all seriousness, I've been thinking about my own fear lately. Though I don't feel my life has been particularly traumatic, I've noticed how much fear has been the prevailing weather of my existence. It's mostly a matter of cultural heritage. My people are self-effacing. As Midwesterners we're accustomed to trudging out in two feet of snow to scrape off our car, and our neighbor's*--but not to sparking any form of controversy. In all situations, we keep our heads down.

I also don't doubt that being female has something to do with this. "Don't make anybody mad" has larger implications for us, as #yesallwomen has made so eloquently clear; that warning dovetails nicely with "No one cares what you have to say anyway."

So I tried to stay quiet. I really did. But then I wrote a book, and now I have to admit, I'm worried about what people will think.

Except, as Rachel Thompson reminds us powerfully, if you write through your fear instead of against it, people will thank you for your authenticity. Also, the people whose reactions you fear most may well surprise you with what they already understand and accept.

And, as Monty Python reminds us ridiculously, we're all going to die someday. More broadly, you will, in the end, be seen and (metaphorically) killed. The fact is, some people are going to dislike you no matter what you do. They won't like your hair, or your voice, or who you remind them of (possibly themselves). They won't like your role at work. In other words, by merely existing, you'll just rub some people the wrong way. As for others, perhaps you'll upset them more by your secretive, apparently withholding behavior. Why aren't you being more open with them? If you're a writer, why aren't you sharing your work?

In short, trying not to be seen is pointless and possibly even harmful in itself. So quit with the hiding, already.

*Note: I now live in California and haven't scraped off a car in nearly three decades.

Going to see the rooster: on meandering in short stories

As I've said on this blog before, I'm a fan of Werner Herzog. That is to say, a fan of the more recent, oddball documentaries, as well as of Wild Blue Yonder, and not so much of the weird, freakish, screaming-in-white-makeup, German expressionist whatever. Call me a philistine.

Anyway, as I've also said, what I like best about Herzog is the way he allows his storylines to meander. In the middle of telling what seems to be an urgent story, he'll often allow the camera to linger on a field of waving grass or a waterfall. These moments provide no information about plot or character, or even necessarily about the setting, of which we've already seen plenty. Herzog just finds the motion beautiful and therefore worth recording.

One of my favorite moments in all his films occurs in The White Diamond, a documentary about an engineering team in Guyana trying to build an airship to fly above the rainforest canopy. It's a dangerous undertaking, as an engineer who attempted it previously crashed and died. But as all this tension builds, Herzog keeps hearing from one of the local team members about his rooster.

I should've had my rooster here with me for the world to see. His name is Red. He has five wives, five hens. So, I get five eggs every morning. Yeah, my rooster's good.

We begin to realize, with Herzog, that he cannot not go and see this creature. So, in the middle of their thrilling tale, they take a day to film the rooster. And he is, indeed, a fine rooster, though he does not appear, to the untrained eye, exceptional in himself. What makes him exceptional is how much his owner loves him. And that love, in some tangential way, is part of the story.

I've been thinking about this moment particularly as I write a new short story. It's always seemed to me that meandering is permissible in novels, but not stories. You don't have enough time. A novel--if we can switch to an other animal metaphor for a moment--can be like taking a long walk with a not-very-well-behaved dog (i.e., your imagination). You and your dog/imagination can wander off the path, stop and stiff the bushes, pee on something, chase something, bark at something, and still get home in reasonably good shape. But a story, I've thought, is an arrow you shoot at a target. Beginning, middle, end. Wham. Everything in service of the relentless forward motion-otherwise, you miss the mark.

Yet the stories I love best, just like novels, don't fly straight and narrow. They, too, meander. Perhaps not as often, or for as long--but they, too, wander off the path to examine something the writer (via a character or the narrator) is irresistibly attracted to. They pause, lurch, and restart, delivering surprising, not completely necessary information. They have an odd, lumpy shape, rather than the dreaded Freytag pyramid.

So here's your permission slip, from me and Werner, to ditch the pyramid. Whether you're writing a novel or a story, I say: go and see the rooster.

Thoughts on re-watching Season One of Battlestar Galactica after 10 (!) years

So we've been re-watching Battlestar Galactica.

1.) The rebooted series started in 2003. Just think about that. I feel like we watched it, oh, five or six years ago. Not freakin 10-plus. Jesus.

2.) This is a post-9-11 show if ever there was one. Everything about it is 9-11, 9-11, 9-11. Terrorism. Torture. Religion. Realization that "we" can't always tell who "they" are, and that "we" don't always have the moral upper hand. General dread and claustrophobia.

3.) So far, the show holds up really, really well, apart from a few things (see 4, below). For the most part the acting and dialog are excellent. Olmos rules. Michael Hogan still possesses the most outsized Canadian accent I have ever heard.

4.) Way, way too much of Boomer and Helo running around in the rain on Caprica. Now as then, it feels like the directors said, "We can't resolve this plotline till Episode 13, so, um, OK, run that way for awhile, and now run this way, and that'll be it for this episode." Novelists have something of an advantage in cases like these; if we have a plotline we don't want to resolve till later, we can just *not write about it* for awhile, or just mention it cryptically or briefly every so often. On a TV series we have to be visually reminded of these characters' existence and what they are doing--and if they're just biding their time on behalf of the storytelling, that shows.

5.) How does one portray a butch, straight female character in a typically male profession? I remember the ruckus (and adulation) when BSG fans learned the new Starbuck would be a woman. For the most part, she's an appealing character, believable in her toughness ... except that we are given to understand that, as with all women, that toughness hides a deep vulnerability. Every now and again we're treated to the sight of Starbuck crying or crumpling into a ball and sort of squealing. We also see her in an evening gown, knocking the space socks off Apollo. Do "tough" male characters show vulnerability in any similar ways, or just pour themselves another drink and/or race off on their motorcycles? Do these brief bursts of stereotypical feminine behavior add dimension to Starbuck, or reassure us that she's really a little girl at heart? And straight! Don't forget straight! Though having a butch woman turn out to *be* straight also challenges stereotypes, I think in 2003 they were more worried about having one of our heroes be gay. OK, they're still worried about that in 2014.

That is all for now. Galactica out.

Ray Harryhausen and writing

In the NYT obituary for legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen, I found myself dwelling on this statement:

“There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in ‘King Kong,’ that adds to the fantasy,” he said in 2006. “If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.” 

As a fiction writer--and reader--I've always agreed with this, without ever quite knowing why. Now I actually suspect it's because I grew up watching Harryhausen's movies, often on the big screen, in gorgeous Technicolor. The way Harryhausen's monsters moved impressed the hell out of me--at once faster and slower than humans, with starker contrasts between light and shadow. I don't remember precisely how they looked. The movement was what made them otherworldly, and therefore more real, in the sense of more plausible as monsters. Why would something from another world (or from the imagination) move as we do, and exist in precisely the same plane? The movements of Harryhausen's creatures made them seem both here and somewhere else at the same time--and that lent them real power and real magic. And as he suggests, the more realistic CG effects become, the more disappointing they become, even as we marvel at the technical achievement. The monsters really have been brought down to Earth.

That's probably not the *only* reason that I prefer a veneer of unreality in fiction. But if you're going to go ahead and create a world, why not let it shimmer and quake a little around the edges? Because you have made something. You have brought something into our world from another one--your imagination. That wonder and that strangeness, it seems to me, deserve attention.

Is it necessary to humiliate your characters?

So I was happily reading this new and highly acclaimed novel. And then I stopped. Because, well, I had reached my limit on watching characters get physically humiliated. I won't go into detail, largely because I am squeamish. But the fact that I decided not to read any further got me wondering. Am I just squeamish? Isn't humiliation a powerful and real experience, which deserves a place in fiction just as much as any other emotion?

I would answer yes on both counts. But I sensed something else going on here, similar to what I've suspected any number of times while watching various movies and TV shows. The writer (or director) seems somehow to be gloating--if not outright enjoying the scene, at least calling attention to his or her daring in creating the scene in the first place. In other words, the characters suffer on behalf of the writer's quest for authenticity. This seems especially egregious when live actors must actually undergo the experience, or some convincing simulacrum thereof. I can't help thinking that a power game is going on, not only in the story, but in the making of the story. And I don't like it.

Maybe that sense of sadism is a natural side effect of depicting humiliation; the author is in the odd position of both creating the humiliation and sort of standing over it, watching, unable to help (because the story demands that the humiliation occur). The reader's in that position, too, because she imagines and therefore recreates the scene. I suppose this complicity can be an informative experience.

It also seems to me that the artistic depiction of humiliation (not to mention its comic counterpart in mainstream movies) is a recent trend that is only picking up speed. A humiliation scene is the equivalent of having your characters use smartphones--it shows you're contemporary. You "get" how the world works today. It's a calling card of realism.

I'm not speaking of stories about war and torture, in which humiliation has a different valence--it's acknowledged as a tool of an oppressive regime. I'm talking about "first-world" stories, garden-variety suburban tales of alienation, where this ugliness seems like an attempt to fulfill some function that the story otherwise might not manage. It's almost an insistence on the story's significance, and on the power of the author's words to stir strong feelings. Maybe suburban life *is* humiliating in a way that can only be expressed through the exaggerating airing of intensely private experiences. Anyway, it's only happening to fictional characters, right? And authors don't owe their characters any protection.

I still don't like it.

Dr. Who vs. Star Trek

On a 1-10 scale of science-fiction geekdom, I give myself a 5. I know not to call the genre "sci-fi," for instance. I know Margaret Atwood once said something about squids in space that didn't go over well. I once read half a Vernor Vinge novel and quite liked it, until I became unspeakably tired of it.

So I now offer these thoughts, knowing that the series in question are both so monstrously popular and intellectually picked-over that I may largely be revealing my own relative newbie-ness. Nevertheless. In the past month or so I have become completely obsessed with the new version of Dr. Who. (I never watched the old version; growing up, I knew it as just some odd thing that was apparently on from midnight till morning on the PBS station.) I've gone out of sequence, starting with the first season of Matt Smith, then going back and doing the three David Tennant seasons, and then backing up all the way to the single first season of Christopher Eccleston. (This first incarnation has been rightly judged as not great, especially in comparison to the others. But it wasn't really Eccleston's fault. They were starting an old series over, and learning as they went what worked and what didn't--for example, that the Doctor should not resemble, in the show's own words, a U-boat captain.)

So here's what I've observed. If Dr. Who is as huge, or huger, in the UK as Star Trek is here, the two series seem to reveal fundamental differences in our respective national self-perceptions. While I like most of the various iterations of Star Trek just fine, I've always found them to be fundamentally dull. That's because the characters are fundamentally dull. From Next Generation on, the human characters are not allowed to be flawed in any serious way. They may have some superficial "quirks" (like blindness or, I dunno, a nagging sense that one hasn't measured up to one's father)--but any real flaws (greed, violence) are offloaded onto other races, who are then mocked and/or fought. This whole structure seems to track with the doctrine of American exceptionalism, in which we (Americans/humans) are always the good guys, whose good intentions always, in the end, produce good results. Because we're good, nothing can really go wrong.

In contrast, might Dr. Who represent the emotional realism of a former empire? Because in this series, the "good guys," while making us love and root for them, do not always do the right thing, for various reasons. Often the right thing to do isn't clear, or it's a choice between two or more equally troubling options. Also, because Dr. Who is focused on time travel, we can discover that what appears right at one moment turns out to cause problems far down the line--as when your apparent rescue of a civilization turns its members into TV-addicted bozos hundreds of years in the future. Your attempt not to cause someone pain causes them more pain, because it turned out you weren't thinking from their perspective at all, even though you told yourself you were. Sometimes, you are just kind of a jerk, because you are tired and stressed and lonely and jealous, like everyone else is.

Perhaps it's un-American of me to prefer this viewpoint. Perhaps it's even defeatist to think that every solution you create might also create problems. But--this is crucial--this does not imply that one shouldn't bother. Knowing better than anyone how things can go wrong, the Doctor never gives up trying to save the universe, and never gives up on humanity, either. He loves humanity. In this way the show might even be more optimistic that Star Trek, because it allows for real human flaws to play a part in the story--even to be the story--while still advocating for the good fight. It's about doing your best, even while you know that time and entropy and your own failings will undo your deeds.

Advertising, fiction, and Mad Men

So I recently figured out that people want the same thing from advertising as they do from fiction: an emotional experience. In advertising, that experience is designed to spur you to buy, or at least think favorably, about a product or service--which may or may not be an admirable goal. In fiction, that experience leads to ... what, exactly? If there's a purpose beyond giving the reader pleasure (and I don't think there needs to be), perhaps it's strengthening the reader's capacity for empathy. Some studies show fiction actually does do this, although it could still be a chicken-and-egg problem (maybe more empathic people tend to read more in the first place).

At any rate, at the heart of both successful fiction and successful advertising is people's hunger for emotional experience. Not just pure experience, though--it somehow needs to be at a remove, so that it's safe and understandable, as well as powerful. You want the experience plus the meaning, or the solution. Fulfill that hunger, and you've got yourself a happy reader, or a willing buyer.

All of this reminds me of a scene from the first season of Mad Men, which has always stuck with me. Here, Don Draper presents his campaign for the Kodak slide "wheel," which he has renamed the Carousel. I find this a tremendously moving, and telling, scene. It's layered by Don's own nostalgia for a childhood he never really had, and for a family that, even now, is not exactly his (because he cheats on his wife, and, as we begin discovering in this season, he's assumed another man's identity). His longing exists, as perhaps it does for all of us, because he can never have what he seeks: a true home, an ideal past. He can only have a substitute, or talisman--the slides, and the projector that lets him see them. But the scene is also powerful because it illustrates the genuine power of advertising. There may be something sinister or shallow in its motives--the bottom line is always shareholder value, and eventually the projector will end up in landfill, or, as in my family's case, in a box in the garage marked "SLIDE PROGECTOR." Yet the emotion the campaign generates, in Don and in us, is anything but false. And that's why we still, at least somewhat willingly, respond to ads and to fiction: we want this genuine experience, in any form we can get it.

Freaks and Geeks and mining your childhood

We just watched Episode Fifteen of the eighteen total episodes of Freaks and Geeks. As we near the end, it's all starting to seem darker and sadder, because we know there will never be any more episodes, ever, and also because the later episodes explore darker themes (addiction, accidental pet death, accidental/deliberate human almost-death).

Still, it's a beautiful show, possibly the best TV show ever made. And one reason for that is mentioned in one of the commentaries. For months before they actually wrote the scripts, the writers sat in a room and dredged up all their most painful/embarrassing/astonishing high school experiences and shared them with each other. They then used these in the scripts, as they actually happened, or seemed to have happened in memory.

Now, sitting in a room and trading high school horror stories sounds like something I would gladly forgo in favor of a two-hour visit to the dentist. I also have a problem with fiction that sounds too much like someone reliving his or her personal victimization. (The Missouri Review has a blog post on the related matter of defining characters by their traumas.) However, F and G avoids such maudlin pitfalls, and instead just feels perfectly real and honest.

How did they do that? My guess is that it came about precisely because the writers refused to protect themselves when telling their stories to each other, and thus refused to protect the characters. Of course we are not talking hideous tragedies here, only the ordinary but highly significant failures of adolescence. Yet, speaking for myself, I can well imagine wanting to somehow "spin" these excruciating memories either to make myself look better, or to punish my youthful self more severely (which is another form of self-protection). But what happens if you just tell the story without trying to steer the reader's or viewer's reaction one way or the other? The F and G writers, as they mention in other commentaries, often didn't set out ahead of time to write comedy or tragedy; they just let the stories play out. Some turned out to be funny, some were sad, and most of the time they were both.

I'm not sure what it would take for me to be able to tell such stories honestly in fiction or--god forbid--memoir. Perhaps the group process the writers used helped: they all must have realized that everyone had experiences that still gouged their insides out when they thought of them. Their personal disaster wasn't so bad in the great scheme of things. In the same way, when we see the stories on TV, as viewers, we find them funny, forgivable, and ordinary in the most redeeming sense. Maybe that's the best kind of group therapy (mass group therapy) of all.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Point of view

I will get to this week's discussion of Hound via Transsiberian. I mean Transsiberian the film, of course! Like most people I had never heard of this 2008 film, and that's because it opened the same day as Dark Knight. We watched it last night; in accordance with the consensus on IMDB, I thought it was a little better than average. However, there was a certain moment about 1/3 of the way in that put me in mind of how very difficult it is to narrate a thriller/mystery.

Roy, played by Woody Harrelson as a less sophisticated version of his Woody-the-bartender character on Cheers,* is taking the Transsiberian railway back from China with his wife, Jessie (Emily Mortimer). They share a compartment with a young couple, Carlos the Suspicious Spaniard and his girlfriend, Abby. Now, there are a few reasons Carlos is suspicious. He knows a lot about crossing borders while evading scrutiny by customs. He lugs around a cache of matryoshka dolls, which he shows to Jessie but not to Roy, or, it turns out, to Abby. Carlos is showing a tad too much interest in Jessie. Abby is unhappy.

But then the movie gives us a false reason to suspect him. While the train is stopped at a station, Roy, a train buff, heads off to see some old trains in the yard, and Carlos goes with him. While Roy is enthusing over some gizmo, we see Carlos, behind him, pulling a metal railing loose. He bangs it on the ground as Roy trots ahead, and...end of scene. In the next scene everyone is back on the train except Roy. Carlos insists that Roy wandered off and probably lost track of time; he and the train personnel are certain he'll be on the next train (arriving tomorrow), so the three other main characters get off at the next stop to wait for him at a hotel. But Jessie can't send him a message or receive one from him ("Thees ees Rah-shah," the hotel manager keeps saying, while shrugging). Meanwhile Carlos, as we later learn, has taken the opportunity to stash his matryoshkas in Jessie's luggage, and they're not dolls so much as they are compressed and painted gobs of heroin. Before we discover that, though, Carlos convinces Jessie to take a long walk in the woods with him, where they come upon an interesting old church, where Carlos and Jessie start kissing, only Jessie changes her mind and Carlos tries to force himself on her and Jessie beats him to death. OK, so: Carlos killed Roy, right?

No, Roy is on the next train. I suppose you could imagine that Carlos meant to kill Roy but didn't have the opportunity. But he had the perfect opportunity in the train yard, and Roy's absence from the train seems to accomplish what he set out to do, which was to separate him from Jessie. Also, Roy, as oblivious as he is, might have noticed someone trying to whack him with a length of metal pipe. Carlos's grabbing the pipe, followed by Roy's absence from the train, is a trick on the audience, and nothing more. The real action is yet to come, with Jessie trying to hide the fact that she killed Carlos, and get rid of the dolls, while the ominous Ben Kingsley, supposedly some kind of cop, is on her trail.

We see these tricks all the time, especially in movies. They're meant to make us jump or to feel foreboding, like thunder or lights flickering or unintelligible whispers in a hallway. But they also feel unfair, because we know the storyteller knows they lead nowhere. The storyteller is blatantly manipulating us, which is sometimes OK if it's done especially elegantly, but it usually isn't. And one reason we feel manipulated is that the film medium tends to suggest direct access to what's actually happening. We aren't seeing the events through a single character's point of view; we're seeing the events themselves. If those events turn out not to be true, we sense the storyteller/filmmaker is dishonest.

Conan Doyle, in the Sherlock Holmes tales, gets around this problem by having Watson be his narrator. Watson works especially well in this role because he's a participant-observer. He does a lot of the sleuthing himself, as in Hound, when Holmes sends him off to Baskerville Hall to learn as much as he can while Holmes is doing other stuff back in London. Watson collects his observations meticulously, knowing Holmes will question him about everything, and he also ventures some interpretations. Many of these interpretations will necessarily turn out to be wrong, but when they do, we won't feel tricked--because the point-of-view character was only speculating. We trust Watson; we know he's doing his best, so his mistakes are honest ones. He's not deliberately misleading us, even though the author can use Watson, up to a point, for that very purpose.

The bad news is that if we contemporary writers try to adopt too obvious a Watson figure to tell our own mystery stories, everyone will probably realize we've stolen him or her from Conan Doyle--unless we make it clear we know we've stolen him, in which case, fine. But for mystery writing, some kind of competent, honest, but necessarily unreliable narrator seems like a good bet. I don't know how you would accomplish the same thing on film. There really is a sense that the movie camera is omniscient, which make any false threats, or cuts at the crucial moment, feel cheap.

*By the way, when is Woody Harrelson going to age? Is he just an excellent advertisement for veganism, or is something more sinister afoot?

Stories without consequences

So like just about everyone else I've been watching Downton Abbey. I've now watched every episode, always a day or more late, since we don't have TV, only the Internet.* I can't say I have Downton-mania, exactly. I don't love it or hate it. Most of the characters leave me cold, and I've conceived an outright loathing for Mr. Bates that I can't explain. Even Maggie Smith's well-delivered witticisms seem forced. When the camera turns to her, I sit up with a chuckle at the ready, and am always a little disappointed with the zinger.

Yet I keep watching, because, I think, of the storytelling itself. More precisely: because of what seems to be very flawed storytelling. I have never seen a show in which huge plot points so often turn out--thus far, anyway--to have such minimal consequences. I guess the rest of what I have to say involves spoilers, so stop reading if you really don't want to know what's been happening. But, just of late: Only one minor character dies in the war, and his widow never loved him anyway. A major character is paralyzed for life, feels a tingle, and is dancing by the next episode. Same character's betrothed dies from the Spanish flu so that he is free to marry the woman he really loves. Headstrong daughter runs off with chauffeur, causing Lord Grantham to withhold his blessing and his money until...he doesn't anymore and everyone hugs. Lord G embarks on an affair with a maid, who then decides she ought to resign for the good of everyone, and leaves. Lady G gets deathly ill and then better within ten minutes.

So: no real freakin consequences. Or, not yet. If everything comes around again in some ingenious interweaving of these previously pallid storylines, I suppose I will have to print out this blog post, spread it with Earth Balance, and eat it. I will be especially delighted if (SPOILER) Mr. Bates really did kill his wife and has to do real jail time for it--even though he would be blameless because his wife was so purely, inexplicably evil. The bottom line is, these episodes feel like first drafts.

I've had the same problems in the first draft of my second novel. Now that I'm revising, I can see how often I wanted to leave my options open as I felt my way along. I could see plot lines heading a particular way, but realized that if they went too far, that character would no longer be around for the rest of the story--and I might still need him or her. So there's this repeated phenomenon of minor consequences for what seem to be major events or threats or screw-ups. The characters, Wile-E-Coyote-like, bounce up after being crushed by anvils, and then wait around to see what else I've got for them to do. At least when writing a novel you can, theoretically, revise once you get to the end, and do so more than once. Perhaps you don't have time for such with series television. You have to get it right the first time, which would be a pretty scary assignment. No wonder Lost went off the cliff.

*Which does not make us more virtuous than those who have TV, at least not anymore. I waste far more time in the Internet than I ever did watching TV.

Books, ebooks, and how everything's always changing

So Jonathan Franzen has gone and said another odd thing in public, this time about ebooks and their apparent threat to civilization. Not surprisingly, I'm ambivalent about these remarks. I do wonder about the relative impermanence and mutability of ebooks (though the corollary is that ebooks won't go out of print, at least not in such a definitive manner). Personally, I have yet to read an ebook, though not for any ideological reason. It's just that I do so much reading on screens, and this reading is mostly of a scattered, nerve-jangling quality. (When I'm online, I picture my brain cells as little bubbles in a pan of simmering water.) I turn to physical books for relief from that kind of reading--for immersive reading experiences. But I doubt I'll be doing this forever. There's too much to like about the convenience of ebooks.

See? Ambivalence.

However, last night I watched this NOVA documentary about attempts to authenticate a drawing thought to be by Leonardo. As Walter Benjamin told us long ago, our definition of "artist" relies on the physical presence of a single work of art--even as technology makes those works more and more reproducible. What will it mean to authenticate written works, once they all go digital? Probably most authors these days compose on a computer, with a minimum of handwritten notes. In theory, we still have Stephen King's Wang to give us some sense of origin (although not in practice, as it turned out). But as books become less and less physical, all sloshing around together in the "cloud"--itself a metaphor for an even less physical entity--will our sense of the term "author" change, too? Will we start to seem less like physical beings who made something, and more like wisps in the cloud ourselves?

And if so, is that all bad?

Peter Cook

For some reason, for the past few weeks I've been oddly obsessed with the late British comedian Peter Cook. Maybe it has something to do with the holidays, which make me think of my parents, which brings to mind their senses of humor, which derived in part from their record of Beyond the Fringe, which we listened to often when I was little. ("Then, unavoidably, came peace.")

Anyhow, watching Cook in Not Only...But Also recently, I was struck by his presence--the combination of his rather delicate features with a total, fearless comic spirit. This is not to say he was an over-the-top performer. On the contrary, there's a quietness about him that you don't see much in contemporary comedy. I think Stephen Fry put it well in his statement about Cook a few days after his death in 1995: "He had funniness in the same way that beautiful people have beauty."

Here is that commentary by Fry, who was objecting to the media's laments about Cook's "unrealized potential" and "flawed" personal life. It includes some useful thoughts on the meanings of ambition and success.

Is art too tiring?

So we got the first disk of Beckett on Film from Netflix (hooray, not Qwikster!) about two weeks ago. Today I sent it back unwatched. Instead of Waiting for Godot, we spent the last two weeks on a steady diet of Friday Night Lights alternating with Arrested Development.

Now, as middlebrow entertainments go, these two shows are near the top, critical-acclaim-wise. No Celebrity Liposuction for us!* And yet, compared to Beckett, neither can be called challenging. FNL has plenty of emotional drama, and often crosses the line into melodrama; I care about the characters and events, and am even strongly moved on occasion. So there's an emotional challenge, I guess--but I can't say the show makes me think or wonder, beyond "What's Tim Riggins going to do now?" And AD...well, it's just funny.

The thing is, I've always loved Beckett, or thought I did, so why didn't I want to watch the DVD? The answer seems to be that after a full day of writing and/or editing, I just didn't have the energy. I knew the Beckett was going to require something from me--even Godot would, and it's the least challenging of all his work. I want to be done working in the evening. Not that I want to turn my brain off, or have it bludgeoned into irredeemable stupidity by some reality show. I want to be engaged, but not asked to do too much; I'll row, but I don't want to be the one in front (or back, or whichever one does the most work).

But this is a worrisome realization. I think of myself as an advocate for high art--you know, literature and its ilk, the stuff you're supposed to need some sort of college-level training to enjoy. If I can't bring myself to pop in that Beckett DVD after a work day, what hope is there for people who have no stake in supporting the arts? What if most people just have too much going on mentally to devote any extra brainpower to the finer creations of humanity? Can we blame our overworked, overstressed populace if they pick their mental and emotional battles, and they don't pick art?

Maybe watching the Beckett would have refreshed and invigorated me with its greatness, whereas FNL and AD mostly soothed me. But at a certain point, soothing is what I want.

*I don't think this show actually exists.

In praise of unlikable characters: Pete Campbell

So I blew through the fourth season of Mad Men on Netflix, and made a surprising discovery: Pete Campbell is my favorite character.

This discovery interests me because I have been harping off and on about the issue of likable characters in fiction. In fact I created a class around the topic at Stanford a few years ago. To recap, it always bugged me in fiction workshops when people would say something to the effect of, "I just don't like this character," meaning...well, I wasn't sure, exactly. The story wasn't working for these people, but was it because they felt the character was immoral? Or they couldn't "relate" to the character, meaning he/she didn't evoke sympathy in the reader? Do all characters have to be someone we would want to be friends with in real life? I thought not. But characters to have to engage us, and I have been at pains over the years to figure out how.

In the first few seasons of Mad Men, Pete was the character I loved to hate. I hated his pinched expression, his sense of entitlement, and his peevishness when that sense ran up against some real-world obstacle. (Also he was a jerk to Peggy, and his wife, and all women, but that of course doesn't make him anything special in the MM world.) He was like a little boy entering the grown-up world a little too soon, and finding out that it was not at all what he'd expected.

But who can't relate to that? Who hasn't felt, after a long day at some office, that "I was led to believe there would be cake" feeling, and wanting to whine about it? Where is the damn cake? And the freedom, and the knowledge, and the power that all adults were supposed to have, all of which I was supposed to have, too, once I grew up? It's all a big ruse, this adult thing? Now what am I supposed to do?

Also in this past season, I've noticed another quality in Pete that I admire: his commitment. Even as he sees (and complains about) the Don Drapers of the world trampling on the less handsome and less lucky and (so far) getting away with it, he still puts on his suit and shows up at work and does his god-damnedest to haul in new clients. We may not think much of the value of the work he does, but he does it extremely well. Despite all the problems he sees, Pete is not yet ready to give up on his dream. He signed up to be an ad man, and that's what he's going to do.

Lots of credit, of course, must go to the actor, Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete without a trace of vanity. He never winks at the audience, inviting us to mock Pete or to remind us that he isn't "really" this guy. The commitment we sense in Pete is the actor's commitment.

So what does this all mean for writers trying to create interesting characters? By which I mean, characters who are complex and engaging and challenging--not simply mirrors held up to flatter readers' (and our own) moral vanity? Well, the creator of characters must understand them. I may not like or admire Pete's peevishness, but I know where it comes from; I've felt it, too. In other words, Pete feels like a creation from within. He's not a cartoon, observed and imitated from outside, but grown out of common, if embarrassing, emotions.

All of which suggests that a great character might start out as some complex twinge in the heart, rather than as an image, or a type, or a role you need played in your story. And you need to commit to that twinge, not wish it away, or wink at it.

Werner Herzog (again)

Missed my Tuesday blog post. Swamped. Fortunately The Millions has a great post up about Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and that wild, wacky, Herzogian method of magic. Enjoy...

The showing never stops, nor does the telling

In the endless quest to make sense of the "show, don't tell" dictum--which I would actually love to bury, except that, once under the earth, its bones begin to glow mysteriously, and the earth above them to rumble, until the monster bursts forth, more powerful and threatening and unhelpful than ever--

Start again. Recently, Alan Rinzler made an excellent point about "show, don't tell." Although he doesn't actually use that phrase, which is probably all to the good. The point is, writers have to consider the reader's experience:

Have you ever been to a movie where there’s an annoying voiceover narration that keeps commenting without adding anything to what you’re seeing on the screen?

That’s equivalent to an excessive explanation that an author inserts unnecessarily.

Yeah, that unnecessary voiceover narration. Hello, Blade Runner Not-the-Director's-Cut. The voiceover blatantly tells the audience that the filmmaker does not trust it. Either we are too dumb to figure out what's happening on our own, or someone thought the film itself was too dumb to get the points across. Neither generates good vibes.

Even worse, this kind of explaining shuts down any nuance or variety in interpretation, which is part of the pleasure of viewing or reading art. This is the meaning, the voiceover tells us, nothing else, so stop thinking that other thing you were thinking, you're just wrong. So why are we reading this novel anyway? Why not read a diatribe on The Topic at Hand? Because the diatribe would probably be boring. We're making fiction because we want nuance and ambiguity (which is not, however, the same as obscurity and confusion). We want the reader to participate in an imaginative dialog, not be bludgeoned into submission. That's what I want as a reader, anyway.

I find I do a lot of over-explaining in first drafts, because I myself am trying to figure out what's going on. How does this character feel about his father at this moment? What conflicting emotions are going on inside him? How does he--according to his personality--express or conceal those feelings? And so forth. But after I've finished the draft, presumably I know the answers, and if I don't, I have to find them. So during revisions, I can take the over-explanation out.

Of course, it is exceptionally hard for an author to determine on her own if any aspect of her intention is coming across--or, conversely, if her writing is sufficiently nuanced to allow an interesting range of responses. That's why we all need our good, critical readers.

The Killing, Twin Peaks, and how much we may or may not enjoy them

"The Killing," AMC's new limited-run series (too long to be a mini-, I guess) is getting rave reviews. This one from Matt Zoller Seitz delves into the new show's debt to "Twin Peaks," David Lynch's 1990-91 TV series, often referred to as "groundbreaking." It was also a "limited run," though in this case the limits were imposed by the network, which demanded that the central mystery be solved midway through the second season. Shortly thereafter, and rightly, viewers abandoned the show in droves.

By coincidence, I recently re-watched "Twin Peaks" on Hulu, up to the point where everyone stopped watching--when Laura Palmer's killer was revealed, and the series immediately disintegrated into full-on buffoonery. The show is actually a great study in characterization, presenting us with a collection of oddballs with exaggerated quirks; they don't seem quite like real people, but then again, maybe our definition of "real" in this case comes from other detective shows. What does make us think of characters on TV as real or not real? Aren't the heroic, daring detectives of TV and film mostly projections of our wishes? And don't we know some very strange people in our own lives, when we step back and think about them?

At any rate, the characters of "Twin Peaks" all fit quite naturally into the eerie Pacific Northwest setting; they are appropriate inhabitants of this place. Intriguingly, the main character, Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is from elsewhere--yet he is perfectly suited to the town of Twin Peaks. He fits in by not fitting. I would add that some of the minor characters, included apparently for comic relief, are cartoons, not convincing either as Twin Peaks inhabitants or as people. They exist to slip on banana peels, be hit in the face with rakes, get accidentally pregnant, and have other hilarious mishaps.

This gets at the heart of what I have to say about "Twin Peaks," which is that for all its inventiveness, it contains a cruel streak that seems to go beyond the needs of the story. This is especially true in its treatment of women, who are time and again victims of sadistic violence. Now, this is also true, in many cases, in the real world. I don't believe fiction has to go out of its way to show women as always powerful and free--as moral examples, in other words. Nor should it browbeat us with the plight of victims. Instead, tell us something new, unfamiliar, intriguing, disturbing about violence and its sources.

"Twin Peaks" doesn't do that. Instead, it revels in women's victimization, serving it up as aesthetic entertainment that makes no demands on the viewers' conscience. Again, the aestheticization of violence--and its conversion into entertainment--is part of real life. I'm not saying we should excise this issue from our stories. Instead, the story can ask interesting, uncomfortable questions that do implicate the viewer or reader: Why does this interest you? What are you seeking here? How does the search for justice bleed over into prurient curiosity? What purpose does this curiosity serve? These questions seem even more pertinent when real crimes (like JonBenet Ramsay's murder and many, many others) rather quickly turn into fun for the rest of us. Good fiction could help us understand how this happens, in a relatively safe practice zone. But on such points, "Twin Peaks" has nothing to say, other than check this out, man.

I'm hoping that "The Killing," with its unconventional female detective, will surpass "Twin Peaks" in asking, not exploiting, these hard questions.

What is narrative?

I don't know if this was intentional,* but Google's coffee-pot-and-test-tube graphic today reminded me of The Way Things Go. This is a 1987 short film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, and Wikipedia describes it better than I can: "It documents a long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine."

It begins with a heavy bag hanging by a rope from the ceiling. The rope slowly unwinds, eventually lowering the bag sufficiently to start a tire rolling, which then upends a plank resting on a fulcrum, which flips to propel the tire further forward, causing a weighted ladder to inch down a ramp... You get the idea. The film contains no words. Yet it is amazingly suspenseful. Will the tire stay upright long enough to reach its destination? It has rhythm: some of the events are slow, to the point where you nearly give up on them, and others lightning fast. And although no human beings (or anything sentient) appears in the film, it has characters: the objects that are set in motion one by one, play their brief part in the "story," and then fall to the wayside (or burn).

It's remarkable to think that narrative can exist without human, or at least anthropomorphic, figures to drive it--not to mention without words themselves. There seems to be a deep, underlying flow to storytelling, into which characters and words are woven, and/or to which they contribute. You may have great characters and lovely words, but without this flow, you may not have a story--at least not the traditional page-turning, leaning-forward-to-hear-what-comes-next variety. Is this flow the same as plot? Maybe, but I think it's deeper. It's the conviction that all things in the story are connected, even if you can't exactly articulate how; that the things are there because they have to be. This might actually be a better, or at least a less intimidating way, to think of plot.

You can watch all three parts of the film on YouTube, apparently; too bad it's in separate sections. There are also edits in the film itself, as a commenter on YouTube points out, which suggests the machine's motion may not have been continuous for the full half hour, or that some of the events took too much time for viewers to sit through (like watching something dissolve in acid, for example). If your main concern is whether the machine really worked as shown, this is a problem.

*Oh. The graphic is to commemorate Robert Bunsen's 200th birthday. Guess if you click on the graphic it tells you that, too.

Pop culture in fiction: a ticket to obscurity?

Matt Zoller Seitz has an interesting post up on Salon today about pop-cultural references in TV shows. Recently he noticed that a classic episode of The Simpsons from the early 90s relied on cultural references (to Arnold Schwarzenegger's action-film persona and the Hollywood Squares) that his kids completely missed. He wonders if popular TV shows today, which rely heavily on current references, are sentencing themselves to obscurity in the near future.

I've often wondered the same thing when writing fiction. Should I refer to, say, Justin Bieber or Twitter, if, by the time this piece is published, those phenomena will have gone the way of flip phones? I use the phone example because, in editing some stories for upcoming publications, I noticed a definite lag in their depictions of cell-phone technologies. The stories were originally written a couple of years ago, when human beings other than I still used flip phones and thought they were pretty neat. Of course, this update will only hold for another six months or so. After that, those phone references will likely slide into the worst possible crack of datedness: recent enough to be recognizable, but with that whiff of mustiness that tells us the story (and writer) are just a tad behind the curve.

But back to Bieber and Twitter. If you're writing a story set in present day America (or any number of other countries, really), and it involves kids and/or parents of a certain socio-economic set, you're going to have a heck of a time steering around these things. By consciously trying to avoid topical references, you might tie your story into such knots--or make it so implausible--that it's better just to go through the Bieber, not around it. Still, when Justin embarks on his inevitable decline--not that I wish this upon him or his fans by any means; I'm sure the prospect is still many months off--will he take your story or novel down with him?

One consoling thought is that if your story or novel is around in twenty years (and I'm sure it will be!), those references to Justin Bieber may no longer seem musty. They may actually help root your piece in place and time. That's assuming a) Bieber has reached a sufficient critical mass of fame now that his name will evoke an "oh, yeah, I've heard that name" response in your as-yet-unborn-college-student reader, and b) without making your current readers scream out "Duh!," you've provided enough description and context for Bieber that future readers will at least gather he was a young, cute singer whose haircut sent shockwaves around the world.

In other words, if you're using Bieber in a winking, we-all-know-who-this-is kind of shorthand--as The Simpsons used Schwarzenegger--it will likely be a problem in the future. But if he's not just shorthand, if his presence makes a substantive contribution to the story, you'll be forced to spell that out at least somewhat. That should cut down on the "huh?" factor. Presuming shared knowledge, or shared "knowingness," between writer and reader (or viewer) may be the real ticket to obscurity--as Matt Zoller Seitz suggests.

Here are a few other ways I've thought of to use pop culture references in fiction while ensuring your story doesn't seem dated:

• Set the story in the past. This can be the very, very recent past. I remember talking to a guy in a writing class who said he was writing a "historical novel" set in 2007. It was 2008 at the time. Folks, 2010 is now a setting for historical fiction. Heck, so is March 7, 2011. So is the last minute. My point is, I think this mindset will just slightly shift the way you talk about "current" cultural phenomena--enough that you'll feel compelled to put it in a context.
  
  
• Create a realistic but alternative world, in which Justin Bieber is, say, Jason Beebler. You then can--and must--explain who he is and why he is loved by zillions. Most future readers will probably get the echo, but if they don't, it's no big deal. You've created your own character, who may prove more useful to you anyway, and more interesting.
  

A big hooray for small presses

You like indie films, right? Sure, they're not as glamorous, or brightly colored, or loud as major studio pictures. But they're often more compelling, more human, funnier, and take more artistic chances. They're made by people who like movies at least a little better than money, and they--usually--don't make you feel all icky after watching them.* Why, here's one I stumbled across on Netflix just the other day, and can honestly say I adored.

My point is that those of us who support indie films should offer up some of our hipster love for small/independent presses. If the big publishers are becoming more skittish and dependent upon formulaic blockbusters, plenty of small presses still really want to publish good--and original--writing. Their marketing budgets may be tiny, but they spend the money wisely. Just look at what Starcherone Books did for Zachary Mason.

Here, then, are a few starting points to help you find some great new books to read--and maybe a publisher for your cutting-edge book.

• Fifteen Feisty Small Presses from Huffpo
• The Poets and Writers database of small presses
• The New Pages list of independent publishers (including university presses)
• Dzanc Books and their imprints (Black Lawrence Press, Starcherone, Other Voices Books, Keyhole Press, Monkeybicycle, and Absinthe)
• Bona Fide Books (a personal favorite)
  

I need to do some research on university presses that publish fiction--many do. What else have I left out?

*For an important discussion of ickiness in mainstream movies, see this review of Just Go With It.