Kaze: Kicking Around Some Big Questions

The big questions are the best. Wander through this life, this world, and you can’t help but wonder: What’s it all about? How’d it get started, why is it the way it is, why are we part of it, where are we headed? What came before, what comes after? And what, for crying out loud, does it all mean?

I just read an article by Roger Scruton on a site called—you have to love this—Big Questions Online.  Scruton says that “Thomas Aquinas, who devoted some two million words to spelling out, in the Summa Theologica, the nature of the world, God’s purpose in creating it and our fate in traversing it, ended his short life . . . in a state of ecstasy, declaring that all that he had written was of no significance beside the beatific vision that he had been granted, and in the face of which words fail. His was perhaps the most striking example of a philosopher who comes to believe that the real meaning of the world is ineffable.”



Ineffable—a lovely word to signify that words can go just so far and no further. Scruton’s article—which wins the Kaze Wishes He’d Thought of That Award for best title ever—is called “Effing the Ineffable.” He mentions a slew of A-list philosophers who did a whole lot of writing in the attempt to arrive at universal truth and put it into words, and essentially got nowhere—not that it stopped them from trying. “The history of philosophy,” Scruton writes, “abounds in thinkers who, having concluded that the truth is ineffable, have gone on to write page upon page about it.”

You can identify with that, can't you? All my life I’ve spent what little brains I have trying to figure out whether the story of my life and times, as I’ve constructed that story, is remotely valid, or merely a story. Can we have any confidence, ever, that what we take as the truth is really true?

Beats me. But sometimes it feels like we can. Sometimes life actually feels as if there’s some underlying meaning, as if it's a story being written by some cosmic hand.  Hamlet’s hardly a believer, but even he says—once he’s finally come to terms with “the unweeded garden” of the world—that “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” Yet even he, with Shakespeare’s genius on his tongue, can’t take it much further than that.

That’s because Hamlet’s been away at college, presumably soaking up the great philosophers, and has come home to find that “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet’s been effed by the ineffable.

Fortunately for us creative writers—I prefer to call us “imaginative writers”—we’re exempt from having to spell it all out. Intimation’s our game. Like most other kinds of artists, we use the tools of our craft to surround the ineffable, herd it toward the reader, imply it, hint at it, evoke it. The whole secret is never to try and state it, which would be like dropping a mallet on the reader’s head, and which would have much the same effect.

We couldn’t state it, anyway. That’s the whole point. Once in awhile I’ll experience some uncannily beautiful moment, and feel uncannily as if it contains the truth I’ve been seeking, even if, in an intellectual sense, there’s no way to describe it. Haven’t you sometimes felt that sort of thing? As Scruton says, “Anybody who goes through life with an open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us. When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.”

It’s an awfully endearing characteristic of humankind always to imagine that there is another, brighter world in which the truth is revealed—and from which, perhaps, we can text our friends with the news. And it’s always made me fond of philosophers that they struggle so doggedly with the big questions, coming up short but grinding on.

After that dose of highfalutin' prose, you really owe it to yourself to watch the Monty Python video.

Ras: Blog of Week - Ryan Holiday

Ryan Holiday, I think

I’m always impressed when I run across a digital native who’s read a whole book. It shocked me then recently when I stumbled across a guest post on Tim Ferris’s very au courant blog titled “The Experimental Life: An Introduction to Michel de Montaigne” by 21-year-old Ryan Holiday. I’m a big fan of Montaigne, the French essayist who lived in the 1500s. What astonished me was that Holiday’s post is an intelligent take on Montaigne, different from my own recent post positing Montaigne as the first blogger (just a little hyperbole there), but just as interesting and valid as mine.

Ferris, the author of the best-selling book The Four-Hour Work Week, describes Holiday as the director of marketing at the edgy Los Angeles clothing company American Apparel. At first, the skeptic in me wanted to see the purported 21-year-old Holiday as a hoax, perhaps Tim Ferris’s idea of a joke, something like Sidd Finch, the legendary baseball pitcher dreamed up by George Plimpton. But a little Googling convinced me that Ryan Holiday is real. Not only real, but notorious for creating risque ads online for American Apparel. How could a kid barely legal to buy a drink be the Don Draper of the Fast Company crowd and also write a great post about Montaigne?

Then I checked out Holiday’s own blog and discovered that his favorite book is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, another of my main men. I’m still not entirely sure how much of Holiday is genuine and how much is savvy marketing of his personal brand. All I really know is that Ryan Holiday.net is worth reading.

Ras: Three Things I've Learned About Writing Dialogue



Lessons of the Seagram Building

 "Dialogue in a novel is like stained glass, the surrounding prose is there to frame and support it.” Frederic Raphael


Writing good dialogue is a tricky business. Harder than it seems at first. David Lodge in his magisterial The Art of Fiction spends 50 chapters summarizing his long wisdom, but never takes up dialogue per se.

I’ve learned a few principles of dialogue the hard way. Here then are the fruits of my mistakes:

1 – Dialogue relies on artifice.

Dialogue on stage or on the printed page is not really how people talk. If you ever do a taped interview and have it transcribed, you’ll see this instantly. Even articulate speakers hesitate, make false starts, repeat phrasing, constantly use filler words like “uh,” and often have trouble saying precisely what they mean. That’s the way the mind works.

If your dialogue mirrored actual speech, it would quickly become tiresome. Dialogue on the page is edited speech, the speakers’ words honed and polished. If it’s repetitive, it’s not too repetitive; it’s repetitive in a usefully literary way to achieve an effect. Good dialogue creates the illusion of reality.

How do you learn what good dialogue is? I’m convinced there’s only one way: study the masters, line by line.

Kaze: Ted the Cat on the 2010 Election Returns

Yesterday we experienced what the pundits call a “wave” election. Out with the incumbents, in with the challengers—that about sums it up. “Ted,” I grumbled while the returns were coming in, “This year, I think you could have gotten elected.  And you’re just a cat.”  I'll admit I was feeling rather grumpy.  This morning I found these words on the monitor upstairs.


so mr big is just lying there
looking like somebody put an old metal trash can
on his head and hit it with a mallet
i went up to him and rubbed the corner of my mouth
on the corner of his glasses
nothing
i made that purring noise he likes
i head-butted him
but he just lay there staring into space
muttering a single word again and again
boehner
then he moaned and rolled over and
put his face in the sofa cushions
listen i wanted to say
you can’t take the election returns personally
you have not been personally repudiated
only the people you root for were repudiated
along with everything you believe in
but not you
if more people knew you then maybe
but nobody knows you
except me
and then i wedged myself up against him and
felt a little guilty but
only a little

Ras: Hint Fiction – Gimmick or Elegant Moment?

It had to happen. In an age of digital multi-tasking, the latest trend in fiction is toward the supershort. “Hint Fiction” is the coy term of choice coined by Robert Swartword 18 months back in a blog post “Hint Fiction: When Flash Fiction Becomes Just too Flashy.” Note: “Flash Fiction” and “Sudden Fiction” are more common terms that refer to the better established longer form, stories of less than 500 words.

Hint Fiction maven Swartwood

So what is Hint Fiction? Swartwood's definition: “Inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s infamous six-word story — ‘For sale: Baby shoes, never worn’ — Hint Fiction is a story of 25 words or fewer that suggests a larger, more complex story.”

There are already Hint Fiction contests online, a Facebook page with 500-plus fans, and a Canadian writer named Arjun Basu who goes Hint Fiction one step better. He tweets 140-character-max stories to his 53,629 Twitter followers. Swartwood himself has edited the just-published Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, a collection that is getting much play in the blogosphere and even among old-media literati like Ian Crouch of the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog.

Kaze: James Patterson, John Keats, a Bird in a Tree

Come here and sit on my knee. I’m going to share with you some wisdom about the writing life. I do this with all my students.

What—you’re dubious? C’mon . . . you know when I’m being ironic. I’m old enough to have acquired some wisdom, but also old enough to know that wisdom cannot be shared—it can be shouted or whispered or hinted at (or all three), but nobody’s going to absorb it and act upon it till it’s theirs, and it cannot be theirs until it’s theirs. All wisdom is gotten by living.

And so all writers start out thinking that success looks like this, and soon find out that success looks like that. And soon it looks like something else, and then something else again. These changes come with the writing life.

At first you just want to finish the damn novel. That would satisfy you. But it never does. You want it to be published. That would satisfy you. But it never does. You want good reviews. That would satisfy you. But it never does. You’ve sold a lot of copies. But you could sell more. With every whiff of accomplishment, somehow the bar inevitably gets raised, and it’s you who raise it. I’ll bet that Philip Roth—rich, famous, revered, and dour, with all his novels on acid-free paper in the Library of America—looks in the mirror at night and wonders, balefully, “Where’s my Nobel Prize?”

Here’s a paragraph I just read about James Patterson, the crime-novel writer whose popular success is . . . geez, I simply can’t find an adjective for it. Here’s a fact: One out of every 17 hardcover novels sold in the United States since 2006 is a James Patterson novel. (Have you got an adjective for that?) The paragraph is from a recent article by Tom Chatfield in Prospect:

Patterson, a former advertising creative director, has achieved a highly-evolved pitch of efficiency as an author. He assembles detailed plot and character outlines, then hands these over to one of his stable of regular co-authors, who complete the writing process under his scrutiny. Last year, nine new titles appeared under his name, and he’s bluntly unsentimental about the writing process. “I’m less interested in sentences now,” he explained in the New York Times in a 2010 interview, “and more interested in stories.”

To which I must say: More power to him. But apart from the $70,000,000 or so he made last year, do you envy him?

The wisdom I’d love to pass along is that if you’re a writer—someone who writes because he or she feels not just an inclination, but a need—then you’re a bird in a tree. You are, as Keats said of the nightingale, “pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstacy.” And just like the nightingale, you’re waiting to be heard. You sing and then you listen. When the nightingale cocks its head and holds very still, and then suddenly hears from somewhere among the other trees some other nightingale sing in reply . . . well, I think that’s the glorious and incomparable sensation you’re seeking when you write. All the ancillary goals and ambitions, they come and go. So, listen: Let them take care of themselves. To sing, to be heard and understood, and to touch a responsive part of someone else—that’s what you’re after.

Write in a manner that is as true to yourself as birdsong. And then listen.

By the way, yesterday was John Keats's birthday.  Bless his heart.

Ras: A Few Words About Dialogue

Vivien Leigh as Blanche relying on the kindness of strangers

“Dialogue at its best is character.” Bernard Grebanier

Try Googling the phrase “how to write dialogue” and you get 19.7 million results. Clearly, there are plenty of folks out there prepared to advise you in seven tips or less on how to improve the way your characters talk to each other, but I find most of this advice unsatisfying. Take the #1 tip from Google’s #1 choice About.com:

Having a sense of natural speech patterns is essential to good dialogue. Start to pay attention to the expressions that people use and the music of everyday conversation. This exercise asks you to do this more formally, but generally speaking it's helpful to develop your ear by paying attention to the way people talk.

Well, yes, of course, as a writer, you need to be a superb listener, but knowing this doesn’t take you very far. Perhaps a better starting point is a fading paperback on my book shelf, a 1961 book by Bernard Grebanier titled Playwriting: How to Write for the Theater. Grebanier, who taught playwriting at Brooklyn College for years is talking about writing for the stage in his chapter on dialogue, but his encomiums have broader applicability.

Ras’s Web Gems: The Gottlieb Jazz Collection

The great Billie Holiday, New York, 1947

New York City, 1938 to 1948, late nights, jazz musicians in small clubs, smoke gets in your eyes. For some of us the world doesn’t get much better than this. William P. Gottlieb, a jazz journalist and photographer, was there, and he managed to get photos of just about every jazzman and singer who came through the Big Town. Gottlieb was a dedicated amateur as a photographer, but he had a knack for the iconic image at the iconic moment.

''I learned to shoot very carefully,'' Mr. Gottlieb said. ''I knew the music. I knew the musicians. I knew in advance when the right moment would arrive. It was purposeful shooting.''

Gottlieb, who died in 2006, turned his collection over to the Library of Congress with the stipulation that these pictures enter the public domain. You can find them on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr in a wonderful section known as the Commons – a place where 46 of the world’s great libraries, museums, and other institutions have pooled their photo collections that have “no known copyright restrictions” and made them available online.

Louis Prima in fine form

Kaze: Laptopless

God, this is hard. I’ve been writing this post by hand. I left for the cabin the other night and forgot my laptop. Since then, I’ve been clutching in my palsied fingers this pen—this perplexing, vaguely recollected “writing implement”—staring at it like an ape with a cell phone.


I had no idea. Honestly, I had no idea of the extent to which my brain had been rewired by Microsoft Word. I’ve forgotten how to make one word lead to another, or to follow the one that just got scrawled on the page. (It took me 45 minutes to write those 3 sentences.) The way I ordinarily do it is to throw a whole lot of words onto the screen, the way we all once scrambled the Scrabble tiles in the bottom of the box, and then pick and pluck and scoot the words from one spot to another till it all makes sense—again, the way we once moved our seven tiles around till we found a word, a word that we didn’t know we had till we’d done all that moving around of things.

But now, laptopless, I’m supposed to write in a straight line. As Tom Hagen told a pleading Sal Tesio in The Godfather, “Can’t do it, Sally.”

Once, long ago, I could write in a linear mode. But I was still composing prose on a Smith Corona portable electric. Some kids broke into this very cabin in 1994 and stole that Smith Corona to sell at the local flea market. Till that day, even though personal computers had begun coming into use, I’d done all my writing (“for old times' sake,” as Tesio said to Hagen) on the typewriter. That way I could still rachet the carriage back at the end of every line, and yank the paper from the machine and wad it up—so cathartic. But after the little bastards stole the Smith Corona I never tore another blasted sheet of paper out of a typewriter again. I became dependent on a computer.

I should have known what would happen.

Soon after John Updike died last year, I read some remarks by his editor at the New Yorker, to the effect that when word processors came in, Updike’s writing changed. The feel of the prose, the pace. My God, even Updike! Consider, then, the rest of us. Think of the holy (wholly?), mysterious process of imaginative writing—the insights and associations that come fluidly, or perhaps in stops and starts, or perhaps not at all; the ease of access to the right word; the coalescence of phrases; the way the ear keeps the beat. All the semi-solid circuitry in the jell-o of the brain, the mental coin-tossing, the shape-shifting of mere intimations into words: all bound up with the tools we use.

So there you are. And here I am, stranded. To the teeter-tottering stack of all the excuses for not writing, add leaving your laptop at home. Notwithstanding the fact that Shakespeare cranked out the collected works without a laptop handy, it’s beyond me to write so much as a reasonable couplet without one. The Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope wrote 170,000 pages of fiction, all without a laptop. Melville wrote Moby Dick. God wrote the Ten Commandments. But me? This post is about as good as it’s gonna get. The brain’s unplugged. You can thank the guys in the IT department.

"Tom, can you get me off da hook?"

Someday, the nation’s electrical grid is going to crash, and after all the batteries go dead we’ll be writing with pens again…or sticks in the dirt…or perhaps we’ll all sit around our fires in the darkness, cooking whatever we can catch with our hands and telling stories aloud. Meanwhile, I am hooked up again, as if intravenously, to my laptop, and having just spent a torturous hour transcribing my own handwriting, sure do hope the power stays on.

Ras: Great Endings

What makes a great ending to a story? Even as I ask the question, I realize that every great story ends in its own way, whether it be happy or unhappy.

Kee Malesky

The question arises because Kee Malesky, a longtime librarian at NPR, has come out with a new book titled All Facts Considered. She concludes the book with her choices of a dozen great ending passages for works of literature. Her list:

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

 Middlemarch by George Eliot

 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The World According to Garp by John Irving

 “The Dead” by James Joyce

Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

The Pearl John Steinbeck

 Native Son by Richard Wright