Borrowed Fire: The Door in the Wall: The Conversation

Our next story is "The Door in the Wall," by H. G. Wells.

I first came across this story while doing research on Nabokov's Lolita, which I taught in my class, Does Literature Matter?, at Stanford. In his article "H. G. Wells's 'The Door in the Wall'" in Russian Literature,"* Richard Borden shows that this particular tale strongly influenced both Nabokov and another favorite of mine, Yuri Olesha. Nabokov vividly alludes to this story in the enchanting, green-suffused scene in which Humbert Humbert first sees Lolita sunning herself in the backyard.

We'll get back to greenness and enchantment. For this post, I want to talk about the frame for this story. It always amazes me how many science fiction and fantasy stories are portrayed as conversations, or remembered conversations ("The Turn of the Screw" comes to mind, as do many of Poe's stories, Bellamy's Looking Backward, Poul Anderson's stories, and many others). The story is either told directly to the narrator by an acquaintance, or the narrator is recalling how the acquaintance (or friend) told him the story. The narrator himself disappears for most of the tale, but steps in every now and then to comment on the storyteller's emotional state (often distraught or seemingly deranged)--and to wonder whether the story could possibly be true. I've never been quite sure what this convention does for us as readers, but because it's so prevalent, it must have some special power.

So here's the opening of "The Door in the Wall":

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well."

Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey--I hardly know which word to use--experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever, throw no light on that. That much the reader must judge for himself.

The narrator's musings about truth vs. fiction, and the overall distancing effect of his presence, aren't particularly earth-shaking as devices; in fact I'd venture to guess that even by Wells's time these were cliches. We don't see this set-up too often in contemporary literary fiction, perhaps for that reason. And yet, the narrator's ability to comment on the storyteller, as well as the story, seems like a great opportunity. I also like the notion of creating a setting for the telling of the story, which contrasts with the actual story's setting. The former is usually some tranquil or festive domestic scene; a little dinner, a little wine, a little party. Those hearing the tale are often a bit bored with their staid, comfortable lives, and relish being shaken up--although they generally end up more shaken than they wish to be, and sometimes make themselves part of the story later on by going out to investigate.

So for an exercise, we can try framing a story in this manner. You might even play up, or play with, this gentlemen-after-dinner cliche, as a starting point for characterizing both the narrator and the storyteller. What's the relationship between these two (or more) people? How does our ability to see and hear the actual storyteller affect the story itself? And what kind of story does this sort of frame seem to generate? Would the teller tell it differently on some other, so to speak, narrative occasion?

* The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 3. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 323-338.

Pudding!

I've had mixed success with recipes from the NYT. And the word "pudding" for me conjures the plastic-within-plastic experience of Jello pudding--not that I didn't love that shit as a kid, but now the very thought makes me shudder.

Anyway: this recipe is beyond great. Do everything it says, and don't be alarmed that right after it's blended it will have the consistency of soup--it will set up beautifully as it's chilled. I used Whole Foods vegan chocoloate chips, to maintain absolute dairy-free purity.

Hint Fiction

An opportunity to be anthologized, in 25 words or fewer.

Vegan fig date bread

This recipe, from The Joy of Vegan Baking (p. 64) is amazing. I don't know how to describe this bread--it somehow tastes deep and warm, even when cooled. The secret seems to lie in soaking the figs and dates in boiling water, baking soda, and oil for 15 minutes, which softens them up and creates a sort of syrup that permeates the bread.

Is it evil to link to a page from Google Books? Is my little teaspoon of a link helping to chip away the edifice of copyright, from which I myself hope to benefit one day? Well, at any rate, you should definitely buy this book.

Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: Justice Done

Here is the text of "The Overcoat," called "The Cloak" in this collection, from Project Gutenberg. (You'll need to do a search for "cloak" or Gogol, since the whole story collection is in one file.)

For this writing exercise, I'm borrowing from two living souls, in addition to Gogol. One is Julie Orringer, whose creative writing class I took several years ago; she taught "The Overcoat" to make us think about fiction as a means of dispensing justice. The other is William Flesch, whose recent talk at Stanford also focused on justice in storytelling. He argues that perhaps the most satisfying aspect of storytelling, from a reader's perspective, is "altruistic punishment." Fantasized punishments, in which those who've done wrong come to see the error of their ways, are more appealing than virtue rewarded--though writers must be careful not to take the punishment too far, or we begin to feel sorry for the punishee. (The same dynamic holds for real life.)

Gogol negotiates this balance perfectly, I think, by making the punishment truly fantastical, even with in the context of fiction (which is already fantasy by definition). After our poor hero, Akaky, finally saves enough to buy his new overcoat, and the coat somehow starts to make his whole life better, he's robbed on the street and his coat is stolen. Seeking help, Akaky goes to see a "prominent personage," who, although he appears late in the story, quickly becomes the main villain. The "prominent personage" verbally abuses Akaky so severely that Akaky becomes ill and, after a short time, dies. At this point, we really, really want to see justice done, and Gogol provides. But he also makes Akaky's ghost the instrument of justice, so that we remain just a bit doubtful as to whether the retribution really happens:

Suddenly the important personage felt some one clutch him firmly by the collar. Turning round, he perceived a man of short stature, in an old, worn uniform, and recognised, not without terror, Akaky Akakiyevich. The official's face was white as snow, and looked just like a corpse's. But the horror of the important personage transcended all bounds when he saw the dead man's mouth open, and heard it utter the following remarks, while it breathed upon him the terrible odour of the grave: "Ah, here you are at last! I have you, that--by the collar! I need your cloak. You took no trouble about mine, but reprimanded me. So now give up your own."

The pallid prominent personage almost died of fright. Brave as he was in the office and in the presence of inferiors generally, and although, at the sight of his manly form and appearance, every one said, "Ugh! how much character he has!" at this crisis, he, like many possessed of an heroic exterior, experienced such terror, that, not without cause, he began to fear an attack of illness. He flung his cloak hastily from his shoulders and shouted to his coachman in an unnatural voice, "Home at full speed!" The coachman, hearing the tone which is generally employed at critical moments, and even accompanied by something much more tangible, drew his head down between his shoulders in case of an emergency, flourished his whip, and flew on like an arrow. In a little more than six minutes the prominent personage was at the entrance of his own house. Pale, thoroughly scared, and cloakless, he went home instead of to Karolina Ivanovna's, reached his room somehow or other, and passed the night in the direst distress; so that the next morning over their tea, his daughter said, "You are very pale to-day, papa." But papa remained silent, and said not a word to any one of what had happened to him, where he had been, or where he had intended to go.

This occurrence made a deep impression upon him. He even began to say, "How dare you? Do you realise who is standing before you?" less frequently to the under-officials, and, if he did utter the words, it was only after first having learned the bearings of the matter. But the most noteworthy point was, that from that day forward the apparition of the dead official ceased to be seen. Evidently the prominent personage's cloak just fitted his shoulders. At all events, no more instances of his dragging cloaks from people's shoulders were heard of. But many active and solicitous persons could by no means reassure themselves, and asserted that the dead official still showed himself in distant parts of the city.

So "The Overcoat" dispenses justice, but--this is the key--not too neatly. Akaky suffers just a little too much, and his suffering is not quite redeemed. The punishment for those who hurt him, while seemingly fitting, can't be verified. And it's these imbalances that somehow give the story perfect balance, making it supremely satisfying.

The writing lesson here? When it comes to justice, give with one hand and take away with the other.

The Art of Living

A great discussion on KQED's Forum about literature and the good life, with my friends Lanier Anderson and Josh Landy.

Bigot smackdown

Back in slave times, well-meaning folk made the argument that slavery hurt whites as much as blacks. For whites, the harm, of course, was to their moral character, and in a deeply religious society this was (and still is) serious business. You could go to hell. The argument also worked because it allowed whites to think of themselves as victims rather than perpetrators or beneficiaries of an unjust system--so they could be less defensive and more open to the abolitionist message.

When we read such arguments now, how bigotry harms the bigot as much as the victim, they mostly seem facile. But a deeper, subtler truth is still in there, and Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks it. This is a great, great post on how dumb bigots really are harming themselves and the mini-thems of the next generation, to whom they hope to pass the burning cross.

Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: The Elements

The text of "The Overcoat," called "The Cloak" in this collection, from Project Gutenberg. (You'll need to do a search for "cloak" or Gogol, since the whole story collection is in one file.)

Just as in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the St. Petersburg weather plays a significant role in "The Overcoat." The motif of St. Petersburg as a grid imposed upon chaos dates back to Peter the Great, who wanted to construct a "rational," western-European-style city on top of what was essentially swampland. Having been to St. Petersburg, I can tell you the weather is, to put it mildly, changeable; and the futility of trying to give structure to uncooperative nature drives many a Russian tale.

Near the beginning, Gogol suggests--though I don't think this is entirely true--that "The Overcoat" is a story about weather:

There exists in St. Petersburg a powerful foe of all who receive a salary of four hundred rubles a year, or there-abouts. This foe is no other than the Northern cold, although it is said to be very healthy. At nine o'clock in the morning, at the very hour when the streets are filled with men bound for the various official departments, it begins to bestow such powerful and piercing nips on all noses impartially, that the poor officials really do not know what to do with them. At an hour, when the foreheads of even those who occupy exalted positions ache with the cold, and tears start to their eyes, the poor titular councillors are sometimes quite unprotected. Their only salvation lies in traversing as quickly as possible, in their thin little cloaks, five or six streets, and then warming their feet in the porter's room, and so thawing all their talents and qualifications for official service, which had become frozen on the way.

Weather itself takes a back seat later to all the metaphorical weather to which poor Akaky is subject--namely bureaucracy, and the aforementioned cruelty of human nature. Still, I propose a writing experiment in which weather itself drives both plot and characterization. Not necessarily freakish weather (for example, riding out a storm on the high seas), but everyday weather. I'm thinking, for instance, of the Coen brothers' movie Fargo, in which different characters' preparedness for and understanding of snow--that is, endless miles of deep, drifting, relentless snow--signals who ultimately will and won't survive (the Steve Buscemi character being in the latter category).

A human and the weather--an elemental tale in many senses.

The Detroit of higher learning

In the NYT this past Sunday, Mark Taylor coins a provocative phrase, and reminds everybody that the crisis in graduate education has been going on almost as long as Detroit has been building bad cars. He makes a good case that tenure itself is part of the problem, and not just because it results in fewer job openings. Tenured faculty (not all, mind you, but a good portion of them) tend to produce clones of themselves in their grad students, so succeeding generations become ever more specialized and atomized. Taylor proposes abolishing tenure, an idea I hesitate to endorse. For all the problems it causes, I can't think of another way to safeguard academic freedom. If professors' contracts are renewed every seven years, market forces--by which I mean external market forces--will drive their work much more powerfully. On the other hand, a little exposure to the elements might be good. One thing's for sure: universities could not function without the cheap labor of graduate students, and those who sign up for grad school need to know this going in.

Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: Cordon off the Sentiment

Oh, hell, let's do The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol. (On Project Gutenberg, it's part of a collection of Russian short stories, and the title is translated here as "The Cloak." Just search for "cloak" or "Gogol.") I've been resisting this one a little, since my story, "An Eye for Alicia" (in the current issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review) is patterned, so to speak, on this story. The whole business started with an exercise in a class I took with Julie Orringer many years ago, in which we read "The Overcoat" and talked about fiction as a way of dispensing justice. So talking here about "The Overcoat" as a model for fiction somehow feels self-serving and self-sabotaging at the same time...but enough about me and my issues. The story is a great model for those of us who aspire to surrealism and satire, in part because it walks that delicate line between satire and cruelty. The story's oddball narrator invites us to mock the hapless protagonist, Akaky Akakiyevich--but lest we indulge ourselves too much at his expense, the narrator, every so often, calls us out.

Early on in the story, after several amusing paragraphs recounting the history of his ridiculous name, his unfortunate physical appearance, his tedious labors as a copying clerk, and so on, comes this passage:

The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their official wit permitted; told in his presence various stories concocted about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; declared that she beat him; asked when the wedding was to be; and strewed bits of paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akaky Akakiyevich answered not a word, any more than if there had been no one there besides himself. It even had no effect upon his work. Amid all these annoyances he never made a single mistake in a letter. But if the joking became wholly unbearable, as when they jogged his head, and prevented his attending to his work, he would exclaim:

"Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?"

And there was something strange in the words and the voice in which they were uttered. There was in it something which moved to pity; so much so that one young man, a newcomer, who, taking pattern by the others, had permitted himself to make sport of Akaky, suddenly stopped short, as though all about him had undergone a transformation, and presented itself in a different aspect. Some unseen force repelled him from the comrades whose acquaintance he had made, on the supposition that they were decent, well-bred men. Long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there recurred to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with his heart rending words,

"Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?"

In these moving words, other words resounded--"I am thy brother." And the young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in the course of his life, shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath refined, cultured, worldly refinement, and even, O God! in that man whom the world acknowledges as honourable and upright.

I love this brief pivot into the consciousness of a minor character, the "young man," who will never be heard from again in the story--and the way this leads to the narrator's sudden cry from deep in his heart: how much inhumanity there is in man! Through the young man's brief appearance, all of Akaky's suffering, and the narrator's sympathy for him, get compartmentalized and distilled. Thus there's no need to lard the whole story with ineffectual calls for sympathy (otherwise known as sentimentality): there's a black hole of human suffering right here, narrow but infinitely deep. Kind of like the LaBrea tar pits, cordoned off but still dangerous, containing eons of suffering, in the middle of downtown LA. In other words, hem in the emotion; keep it tight, fleeting, and intense.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: Wildness

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

The text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

Much critical fuss is made about the "loon" passage.*

As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes, like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval; and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than before. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having apparently passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would immediately plunge again, nevertheless; and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the surface, with hooks set for trout—though Walden is deeper than that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools! Yet he appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface, and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he would rise; for again and again, when I was straining my eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning—perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of the water were all against him. At length having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.

Like the tortoise in The Grapes of Wrath, the loon is known to be highly symbolic and Cliff-notable. For instance, I read on Yahoo's homework help site (who knew?) that "In the loon, the integration of the animal and the spiritual is also seen. The loon in Walden Pond is certainly wild, and that he is more than merely wild is revealed by the narrator's word choices." To think people actually hate English class! All right; I sort of see the integration of the spiritual and the animal, although none of these words have any meaning. And yes, the loon is "more than merely wild."

What I'm interested in here is not the loon as a symbol (god help us) of wildness, but a definition of it. In other words, the loon does not represent wildness, he is wildness itself. And by "wildness" I don't just mean nature vs. human, but complete otherness. The loon is a complete outlier, not just to Thoreau, but to the everyday life of the pond--his "looning" is the "wildest sound that is ever heard here." He makes the woods ring. He's in complete command of the place for the time he's there. He cannot be caught, but he also doesn't really belong there in the first place. All this makes him the very opposite of a symbol, because he can't be interpreted. He eludes and resists--that's what he does, and is.

I'm fascinated by these kinds of uninterpretable figures in literature. Bartleby the Scrivener, whom I have a feeling we'll be talking about soon, is another one. He's simply there, inscrutable, which drives his boss, the narrator, crazy.

A fun exercise (yes, we're there at last) would be, I think, to create a similar type of figure--a kind of fascinating and impenetrable visitor, human or otherwise. This being can be the center of the story--and may inevitably turn out to be that--or a sort of thread that runs through it, popping up at strange times.

Oh--and no, you can't have Bigfoot; he's mine. But here are some other possibilities:
--Nessie
--Some non-copyright-violating version of the Joker from The Dark Knight. Not necessarily evil, though.
--Mini black holes created by the Large Hadron Collider
--Mark "The Bird" Fidrych

*Possibly revealing note: doing a search for "loon" in Walden, I get the following results: pantaloons (at least thrice), balloon, and saloon--along, of course, with just plain loon.

Sea kayaking in Mendocino

Heading out to sea and trusting in our guide, Jeff, from Liquid Fusion Kayaking. That's me in the giant yellow helmet, and my cousin Dana doing the hard part.

OK, I picked one of the most ominous looking photos. Paddling around the rocks was great fun and not very scary, especially because we had real experts in our tandem boats with us, and guides as well. It was also a little exhausting and a little cold, but nothing two pints of beer afterwards couldn't cure.

When we weren't kayaking or biking on a gorgeous trail, we were gorging ourselves on the vegan cuisine at the Stanford Inn. (No relation, or none advertised.) A wonderful spot.

Why do we live on the Peninsula, again?

RIP, Bird

This is sad. I remember Mark Fidrych. My dad and I used to really get a kick out of him.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: Two Fishes, One Hook

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's the text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

In earlier posts, I've suggested some parodic modes of dealing with Walden. Now here's a passage that I think is just straight-on gorgeous:

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

From "The Ponds," this is my favorite passage in the book, partly because I've had similar experiences. I recall fishing at night, once, with my father, although I sometimes think I've imagined it. Especially because I also recall seeing the aurora borealis that night, which I suppose could have happened in northern Michigan but would have been exceptionally rare. I don't fish now, and regret all those bluegill and perch and pike we killed back in the day. But the line extending from air to water, the mysterious communication from some unseen thing below--I find these images fascinating. I'm especially drawn to the disorientation in this passage; the idea that sky and water could change places, just as thoughts and waking dreams change places with fish. Thoreau's line connects the abstract to the concrete, and somehow that flips the world on its head.

We're told in writing workshops to be very careful when writing about dreams and mystical experiences. Too often they come out overblown, laden with obvious symbolism, and somehow boring. But that doesn't happen here, and I think it's because of that horned pout--a fish I've never seen, but which must be as ungainly as its name--squeaking and squirming in the middle of the dreamscape. The precise, mundane and inelegant detail constrasts (as Thoreau himself notices) with the "vast cosmogonal themes," setting them both in relief. In fact, the pout represents detail here.

So go ahead and write about dreams or moments of transcendence or drug trips. But be sure to throw in the horned pout, who'll keep you tethered to earth while you're flying.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: The TOC

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's the text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

There's nothing like a list for making wacky juxtapositions and bringing obscure concepts to the fore. McSweeney's online has a section entirely devoted to lists. Some of the greatest finds in Found Magazine are lists. Lots of contemporary poems and stories are or contain lists.

Looking at the Table of Contents for Walden, I'm reminded of how much I love it as a work in itself:

Economy
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Reading
Sounds
Solitude
Visitors
The Bean-Field
The Village
The Ponds
Baker Farm
Higher Laws
Brute Neighbors
House-Warming
Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
Winter Animals
The Pond in Winter
Spring
Conclusion

The juxtapostions are striking: Reading / Sounds; Solitude / Visitors; Higher Laws / Brute Neighbors. And then the oddly specific outlier, Baker Farm. I also like how the titles circle around the concepts of "warming" and "winter" toward the end--almost like an animal circling before lying down, perhaps in a pocket in the snow. There's a story in the titles themselves, complete with an arc. "Conclusion" puts a weird, dull damper on the whole thing, even though the actual conclusion turns out to be quite lyrical ("The sun is but a morning star" is the last line of the book).

So there are a couple of things we might do with this list. One is to come up with a similar list or lists, inspired by this one--combinations of the abstract and the concrete, seeming opposites which are not quite opposites, with puzzling insertions. Another would be to take the list as a starting point and fill it in with our own stories of "Brute Neighbors" and "Baker Farm," whatever we think those are. Or we might fill in this list with sub and sub-sub lists, using the MS Word outlining tool, which everyone adores so much.

Alaska Quarterly Review

My story, "An Eye for Alicia," is out in the Alaska Quarterly Review.

Borrowed Fire: Walden: The how-to book

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's the text of Walden from Project Gutenberg.

Having escaped the clutches of Dostoevsky's Underground Man (at least for the time being), must we really now turn to Thoreau, the ultimate bane of high school English students, past and present, across this great land? Must we endure the musings of this "inestimably priggish and tiresome" writer, as Bill Bryson has called him? Especially given that Walden, strictly speaking, is not even fiction?

Well, yes. We can at least dip our toes into this sometimes turgid, sometimes glorious pond. I think we can create some interesting variations on Thoreau's techniques and themes--particularly keeping in mind the idea of the sentence as found object.

First off, I'd like to consider Walden as part of that indestructible American genre, the how-to book.* We're the DIY nation, or we like to think of ourselves that way--until, say, we get caught in a Ponzi scheme or invent rococo financial instruments that should by rights sink our company; then we say YDI! (You did it--and You do it!). Anyway, what is behind this urge to document one's experiences so that others may learn from them? Is it selfless or selfish, or some odd combination of both? Why is it so important, when giving advice, to "walk the walk," as Thoreau did (although not to the satisfaction of many critics, like Bryson, who point out that he often availed himself of the conveniences of downtown Concord as well as Emerson's house)? In short, what sort of person takes it upon himself to tell others how to live--and then how does he actually do that?

You begin, it seems, by explicitly stating your credentials and motives, as Thoreau sets out to do in the first couple of paragraphs. Of course he doesn't give us a standard CV (I'm a certified construction engineer with degrees in bean genetics and Classics), but a sort of spiritual resume, based on what he's observed about the human condition. Many of his famous aphorisms ("the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation") come from this section.

So, for an exercise, we can try creating a narrator who's examined the human condition--perhaps in a rather small petri dish, such as Concord, MA or his or her own immediate family--and diagnosed a problem. Have this narrator come up with some carefully styled (perhaps overly styled) aphorisms for the problem, and then begin to lay out a solution. The narrator may or may not have actually lived this solution.

There's no reason why this exercise should turn into a conventional short story with an "arc," although it could. You could, for instance, just fixate on the problem of establishing the narrator's authority. Or you could come up with increasingly absurd diagnoses of the problem that the narrator seeks to address.

Personally, I don't think I could write a completely straightforward, un-ironic version of Walden, so I'm suggesting parodic modes here. But others can and have written their own contemporary Waldens, often to much acclaim--so have at it, if that's your thing. I definitely feel the quiet desperation on occasion, and the lure of the bean-field.

*In the American context, memoir is part of this genre, as a spiritual how-to book.

The "work" section

Another great idea from the Slacktivist.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: Breaking the triangle

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

For the past year or so I've been obsessed with structure, and in particular with undermining "Freitag's triangle"--i.e., introduction --> conflict --> climax --> falling action --> resolution.* The Underground Man, naturally, hates having any structures forced upon him, including 2+2=4, and rails against such things at length in the first part of the book. And by railing, he does win out in the end--maybe he can't defeat 2+2, but he does wreck the triangle.

The first third of NfU, "Underground," is basically ranting. It has no clear narrative structure, no rising and falling action, only churning emotions, intellectual conundrums, and the constant love / hate, push / pull with the reader. The rest of the novel falls under the heading "A Propos of the Wet Snow," and is a much more conventional, triangle-shaped story. It's a memory from the UM's distant past, and may or may not explain how he came to be how he is now. He of course comes off badly, but possibly more sympathetically, in "Wet Snow." Or not. The more I think about the "Wet Snow" section, the more I wonder about its purpose. And that's what's great about this two-part structure.

I can imagine the responses Dostoevky would have gotten in a typical writing workshop: "The second part's great. It really moves. I can really see these characters and relate to them. Definitely cut the first part, though. You're just spinning your wheels. There's no action." But it's the weird relationship between Part I and Part II, and the narrator's refusal to tell a story until he's good and ready, that makes NfU what it is.

So here's an experiment to try, keeping in mind that your writing workshop may lambaste you. Spend the first third of your story (or novella, for that matter) not telling the story. Let the narrator who's on the verge of telling the story lay out all his or her motives, maybe preview the tale and give it some nice, inaccurate Cliff's Notes. Obviously your narrator has to be crazy enough to engage the reader for the duration of this section. You might think of that high school English teacher you loved to hate, and give that teacher some sort of unresolvable moral obsession--like proving the existence of God in a world that clearly suggests otherwise, or resisting some basic law of nature. Then go ahead and tell the story (or rather, a story) in the second part. Don't worry too much about tying the first part to the second, or, worse, with making the second part explain the first. This isn't a flashback to a traumatic childhood, for instance, that tells us why the narrator is such a monster today. It's more like another view of the narrator, and it shouldn't let him or her off the hook.

*BTW I give Eric Puchner a lot of credit for helping me think about these issues, through his Stanford Continuing Studies course, "Fiction that Breaks the Mold."

Craftzine blog

This is cool.

This site makes me feel guilty, of course, but almost everything does that. But really, I should be making gift bags for wine bottles out of old shirt sleeves. Well, maybe I should. I assume the instructions tell you how to deal with coffee and worse kinds of stains that one finds on old shirt sleeves--because if your shirt doesn't have those stains, why aren't you still wearing it? The larger problem, however, is that I hate to sew. It's impossible to describe how much I hate to sew. I can still see that needle sliding deeply into my finger as I tried to finish off my Marimekko pillowcase in seventh grade home-ec. My mother still has the pillow, and my blood is still on it, though it kind of blends in with the yellow-orange cow-spot pattern. But I should sew. I should. Or make lamps out of cereal boxes with pin-hole images.

Anyway, "craft" apparently no longer means strangely hard cloth dolls with gingham dresses and yellow yarn for hair...

The Bay Area Maker Faire, by the way, is May 30-31.