A World of Speculation

Using character autobiography to discover plot

2009-06-17T06:31:00.000-07:00

My character-driven novel has resisted plotting. Experts who specialize in plotting have thrown up their hands and told me it may not be publishable. Others have suggested an infusion of gunshots or perhaps a car chase.

As I told a friend in a whining e-mail, "The other thing I learned from [unnamed experts] -- which is probably more important than anything they knew they were teaching -- is that it doesn't matter what the experts say. It's the process of telling my story that makes me qualified to tell it. And no matter what I've learned from all my teachers, there comes a time to forget the lessons and ride the wave."

Well, that wave tends to crest and trough, and even a character-driven novel needs a plot. The problem is finding it. The problem, as the unnamed expert pointed out, is to find a destination more concrete than the much-too-nebulous "comes to terms with" or "discovers."

But in a character-driven novel, that outline comes from character development, from beginning to end. Plot points will be physical manifestations of changes in the psyche.

So I've begun a long autobiography of my protagonist, and the milestones begin to emerge from the fog. It's not a plot, but it's the landscape where I'll build my road of a plot.

And the gunshots still are limited to the inciting incident.

Fictional snooping

2009-06-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

Here's something I learned from Jurgen Wolff, writing coach and author of various books on motivation, goal setting, and writing. He's also an NLP practitioner, and this little exercise is a way to bring to conscious knowledge a fuller picture of a fictional character or situation.

Get comfortable somewhere where you won't be disturbed, which could include a city bus, park bench, airport. It's not dangerous or embarrassing or anything, but you might look like you're dozing, and if you want to work on your book, you won't necessarily want to have a conversation right then.

Then close your eyes, or leave them open, and relax your extremities. Focus on your hands, feet, arms, legs, and tell the muscles to relax.

Now, think about your character's house. There's nobody home, and you've been given permission to go and browse through and explore as much as you want. You'll be looking for an object of importance to the character that will tell you something about that character.

As you walk in the front door, look around, observe the furniture, wall hangings, state of order or messiness. Go from room to room through the dwelling, seeing what you see, considering what noises you might hear, smells you might smell. Find the object. It could be a book or a photograph or anything. When you've examined the object, put it back where you found it and leave.

There are a million variations. It could be the character's cubicle at work, his car, her dorm room, her garden. What you see will tell you about these people in places where your conscious mind might be inclined to force something foreign onto them and move on, causing the characters to be shallow or unconvincing.

My husband and I were camping in a yurt at an Oregon state park last summer and I noted that there was WiFi. I thought it would be a great place to write, and as we walked around the park I surveyed the writing space of an imaginary writer using a yurt for a writing vacation. I saw books spread out on the coffee table, coffee mug, computer, printer, stack of manuscript pages. When I turned over the pages, I found a novel in progress about an eastern Oregon cowgirl who went to medical school at the University of Chicago. Sounds like an interesting story. Somebody ought to write it.

With practice it gets easier to find that state of waking dream where fictional people walk and act and make choices that surprise even their creators.

My first audio drama

2009-06-07T22:06:00.000-07:00

I just finished up the second draft of my first audio drama. It's been quite the project, and although it's getting closer to where I want it to be, I know it's not there yet. But it's been an incredibly fun project and a good change of pace from the novel, which is on hiatus, but not back-burnered.

Here's what I've learned about writing audio drama so far.

First, here's one handy link with everything you want to know about audio drama and then some: The Well Tempered Audio Dramatist.

Second, I needed to have a fundamental overview of the story beforehand. In writing prose, it's easier to just follow the words to see where they lead. For some reason, though, and I can think of several possibilities, I couldn't just start writing a scene and see what the people said. Maybe it was because I'm not familiar enough with the form and format to stop concentrating on that and follow the story. Maybe it's just my approach. Maybe it's this story.

This story started with a challenge from Willamette Radio Workshop to come up with a 15-minute audio drama in some way inspired by the "St. James Infirmary Blues" for a Halloween anthology production. I thought, that sounds like fun. Too bad I don't have any ideas. And then I got the idea, and that song ran through my head for a few days until I got the bones of the story. Then it disappeared.

And the story -- well, we'll see what comes of the story.

The third thing I learned is that you use sounds to reinforce mood. Well, duh, you say. You're writing audio drama. But my approach was to start with dialogue -- which I suppose is as good a place as any. But when a perceptive critiquer pointed out a two-word phrase that summarized each scene, it gave me the ambient mood of each scene, and then I knew what might happen to build that mood aside from the dialogue.

So happy, victorious, on-top-of-the-world (and the whole play is set in a bar over a period of several weeks) is a baseball game with the home team winning in the bottom of the ninth. And the music I listened to as I wrote the scenes becomes suggestions for the kind of music backing them in the production. Oddly, St. James Infirmary Blues wasn't one of them, but mostly Duke Ellington with a little bit of Django Reinhold and Thelonious Monk/John Coltrane thrown in.

Basic, yeah. But it's a start.

Visit from an old acquaintance

2009-05-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

So I'm walking along, minding my own business, and here comes this novel I gave up on.

"How're you doing?" it says.

"Been a long time," says I.

"You'll never guess what I found," says the novel. "A plot."

"You mean you want to be buried in the garden?"

"No. Beginning, middle, end, plot points, conflict, all that stuff. What you had before wasn't all bad, but there was way too much of it, all over the place. Why don't you sit down and let me tell you about it?"

"But you were dead. Everybody said so. I said so. The experts --"

"Experts schmexperts. What do they know about what's in your head. I had problems, issues. I had to take some time to get to know myself."

"But I'm working on this other one now."

"Yeah. Quiet, thoughtful. Deep if you can pull it off. Listen. I kick butt."

And I think maybe it does.

A song for our Dear Leader

2009-03-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a little something to teach the kiddies at bedtime.

Obama loves me, this I know,
For his website tells me so.
Little ones to the State belong.
They are weak, but Barak is strong.

Yes, Obama loves me.
Yes, Obama loves me.
Yes, Obama loves me.
His website tells me so.

Paperless writer

2009-03-15T21:12:00.001-07:00

A little ditty of mine published in the March 2009 issue of the National Court Reporters Association Journal.

Paperless Writer
(with apologies to the Beatles)

Dear Stenograph, buy back my machine
I've seen the latest, and they're sleek and mean,
With seven backups, give or take a few,
And the latest software, student version, too --
Paperless writer.

I'm tired of ink getting on my hands
And shadowed notes I can't understand.
My teachers tell me it's a bad idea,
But I don't care, because I want to use a paperless writer,
Paperless writer, paperless writer.

I write 120, give or take a few,
And I'll pass 180 in a week or two.
I'll take my first depo by tomorrow week,
I want to look the part, so I need to have a paperless writer,
Paperless writer.

You can find a buyer for my old machine,
I've oiled it up, so it's nice and clean.
If you must return it, you can send it here,
But I need a break, and I want to use a paperless writer,
Paperless writer, paperless writer.

The Secular Case for Christmas

2008-12-18T11:04:00.001-08:00

My friend forwarded this from the New York Times, in which self-described secularist Laura Miller explains why she enjoys The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe every Christmas, and by extension, Christmas itself.

My friend was saddened and disappointed by the writer's wrong understanding of the source of Christmas. For my part, I'm more or less with Flannery O'Connor -- If Christmas is not the beyond-strange act of a Creator breaking and entering His creation, passing as a weak and helpless creature beset by enemies, but instead is only a sort of Hallmark special, a cosmological Thomas Kincaide painting, then to hell with it.

For me, it's the breaking and entering that makes the rest of it -- Father Christmas, the Yule log, even our funny little Chinese-made whirligig Nativity scene, which this year we're powering with Hannukah candles -- make sense. As we all know from history, weather, and science fiction, when one world breaks into another, there's a lot of swirling and mixing, and surprising things attach to each other. No wonder, then, that everywhere Christmas goes, local reminders that winter doesn't last forever get attached to it (and I'm not entering the argument over whether the Roman solar feast arose before or after the arrival of the Christians, because it makes no difference).

But if the writer likes the Hallmark-Kincaide-Picadilly smorgasbord aspect of the Holiday Season, then she's welcome to her enjoyment. To me, it's like eating the paper wrapped around the chocolate truffles, but if someone doesn't believe that the truffles are edible or even exist, what can you say to prove otherwise?

How novels get started

2008-08-17T19:21:00.001-07:00

On Aug 17, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Anastasia K. Bond wrote:

Fr. George gave me your basket! Not quite sure why he was so desperate to unload it, but you drove away just as I came looking for you. I can bring it next Sunday, or you can swing by sometime to pick it up.

Wouldn't this be a great prelude to an inciting event?? Priest randomly hands off something that must be delivered to someone else...

-Ana

On Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:09:05 -0700, "Jan Bear" said:

I'll get it next weekend. I always get it next weekend, or the weekend after that, or the weekend after that. That's our Father George.

Inciting incident: Priest hands off basket with instructions to pass it on to another parishioner. It seems like a simple thing until:

Thriller: Priest is murdered

Mystery: Recipient disappears

Fantasy: Mysterious voices emanate from the basket

Science fiction: Alien comes to earth in spaceship and demands basket

SF farce: Alien comes to earth in basket-shaped spaceship and threatens to destroy the earth unless basket, which represents their god, is released to them.

Comedy: Basket turns out to be a valuable gift to the parish that the priest has mistaken for a different, similar, and not valuable basket.

Romantic comedy: Person to whom the basket must go turns out to be the story's love interest, and deliverer feels that he must pretend to be Orthodox in order to persuade recipient to go out with him.

Any more?

Jan B.

On Aug 17, 2008, at 4:22 PM, Anastasia K. Bond wrote:

Suspense: A third party stalks parishioner 1, looking for an opportunity to take the basket

Military thriller: the launch codes are cached in the handle of the basket. Navy SEALs are dispatched to retrieve it, but Spetznatz wants it too...

Cozy mystery: the basket disappears during the potluck

Chick lit: the Crones find money stashed inside and take it on a road trip

Cozy mystery 2: the cats sense something far more suspicious about the basket than the fur of Mocha and Sadie

Techno-thriller: the basket is equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment to spy on parishioner 2. But while it is in parishioner 1's hands, it broadcasts her evil plot to slip mind-controlling drugs into the prosphora.

Clancy: Meanwhile, in Moscow, a babushka gives an identical basket to Patriarch Alexei. Her KGB son finds her dead the next morning. At the same time, an Iranian baker receives a midnight visit.

Koontz: Parishioner 1 hands it off to the wrong person. Now everyone wants her dead.

Evangelical: Parishioner 2 is angry with Parishioner 1 for accepting the basket. Can they both see their wrongdoing and find strength to give the basket to the local soup kitchen?

Have we created a monster yet?

-Ana

Another blog

2008-08-03T23:47:00.001-07:00

The last thing I could justify, since I post here so seldom, is starting another blog, but I offer the excuse that it's a group blog, it's a finely focused niche topic, and it's fun.

In that spirit, I offer you the Crones' Old Book Reviews.

The idea is that there's a vast world of literature out there, and the length of our reading list doesn't change the fact that when anybody reads a book for the first time, it's new.

The main difficulty is going to be getting my fellow crones to dive into the pool. (Hint, hint, Barb and Susan. If Mocha and Sadie can review a book, so can you.)

Murderer's Mom -- the pitch (in progress)

2008-05-06T06:40:00.001-07:00

Grace asks: "I get more and more curious about your book. Do you have a blog entry somewhere back there that talks about what it's about, what it's called and all the rest of that? If not, do you feel like doing one just to fill me in?"

Here's the elevator pitch (in progress).

I got the idea for this book when I read the transcript of a dispute between Jeffrey Dahmer's parents over what to do with his brain. They seemed like normal people, each trying to do what's best according to their own lights, and I wondered what it would be like to have a killer in the family.

The story is the emotional and spiritual journey of a middle-class mom, Claire Davidson, whose 22-year-old daughter murders 15 college students in a campus spree killing. In the aftermath, Claire faces the death-penalty trial of her daughter, the dissolution of her marriage, dangers to her children from their peers and their own attempts to deal with the atrocity. She goes on a journey of discovery through her daughter's life, to find out what happened to the girl and how she herself had become a Murderer's Mom.

(Pitch format from Michael Hauge's Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds. He'll be giving a workshop on story structure in the Portland area in July.)

Word count, May 2

2008-05-02T16:59:00.001-07:00

Got back to the story for the first time since before Pascha. It was OK to skip Holy Friday, Holy Saturday and Pascha, but Monday through Thursday of Bright Week? I had a lot of other stuff to do, but also, it's resistance against this painfully shitty first draft.

So I sat in my coffee shop and got just over 500 words and gave up. On the way home, I gave myself a stern talking-to about the fact that the Robert Penn Warren paragraph I posted earlier today was certainly not a first draft and that you can't get to a paragraph like that without a first draft. That was one thing.

The other was that -- as I despairingly notice that I seem to keep coming back again and again to the same set of fictional "facts" -- they are relevant again and again in the story. Instead of thinking that it means I need to find the final resting place for them, before I know all the alternatives, I need to realize that it means they're important, and each time they come up, I learn something new about the character's backstory.

With those two bits of advice, I came home and finished off the word count to 1,035. And the latter observation turned out to be true. I now know that my protagonist will have to make a journey to visit her ex-husband, to Las Vegas perhaps, but maybe someplace else. I don't know for sure where or when.

So I'm back at it again. My preliminary plot planning is making the writing possible, but not much easier. But possible.

When the poet writes a novel

2008-05-02T09:15:00.001-07:00

From Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

"No," he said, and it was another voice, quiet and easy and coming slow and from a distance, "I'm not here to ask for anything today. I'm taking the day off, and I've come home. A man goes away from home, and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees; he walks in the street, and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. They are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears, but there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say, 'Come back.' They say, 'Come back, boy.' So he comes back."

I've been trying to tell people what I love about the writing in All the King's Men, and I generally descend into hand gestures and gibberish. But here's a sample from my ongoing transcription of the novel. Read it aloud, thoughfully. Listen to the rhythm; notice the repetitions. Notice that it's a muscular prose -- by which I mean that it carries information, not just feeling, and the feeling is in the information.

It is also tough-sounding -- which is in the sounds. It has Ks and Ds and not a lot of Ss and Ns.

I can't imagine it being written by some 22-year-old in love with her own voice (of whom I frequently am first, without the excuse of being 22 years old). It's the sound of a man's voice (the first-person protagonist is a man). A woman's voice could be as strong, but it would be different, I think.

Anyway, enjoy.

Jonah and plot structure

2008-04-27T11:03:00.001-07:00

I got to read the book of Jonah at this year's Holy Saturday services. It's a short book, maybe a five-minute read, even aloud, and it offers some some great insights into story structure.

The book is in four chapters. There's little or no ordinary world, and the story opens with the call to adventure.

God tells Jonah to go into Ninevah, "that great city," and prophesy. Jonah heads for Tarshish (Spain -- the end of the world), because he doesn't want to do it. Now there is a refusal of the call. In fact, in this story, he enters his special world -- the ocean voyage -- trying to avoid the adventure that's set out before him, and Act IIA (chapter 1 of the book) is what happens when he does that. (Note to self: if I ever want to have the character spend the first part of Act II trying to escape from the adventure, it can work.)

Well, that attempt to escape doesn't work, and the sailors end up having to toss Jonah overboard to save their own lives. In chapter 2, he gets swallowed by the "big fish" and has his "belly of the whale" experience.

In hero's journey and screenplay story structure, the "belly of the whale" is not the climax, but rather the midpoint. It's a place in the story where there's a change in context (Larry Brooks) -- a plot twist, the arrival of a new bit of information for the characters or the audience. In the belly of the whale, Jonah accepts his mission of going to Ninevah.

In hero's journey language (see Christopher Vogler's The Writers Journey), it's the Ordeal , the place where the character meets death. It might have a near-death experience, a symbolic death, a death of dreams or of ambitions; the audience may be led to believe the character died. This point in Jonah's story has given the name for this point in the story.

Michael Hauge (Writing Screenplays That Sell and Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds) relates the midpoint to the place where the protagonist loses his "identity," a false self or an incomplete version of the self. In Shrek, for example, Shrek's identity is the bravado that protects his inner vulnerability. At the midpoint Jonah accepts the fact that he is a prophet with a mission and begins actiing like it.

In chapter 3, Jonah goes to Ninevah, "that great city" and persuades the people to repent. The king calls on everybody to fast, including the the cattle, and repent from their wicked ways. Jonah's mission is successful, and he prevents them from being destroyed.

Jonah spends chapter 4 whining because God didn't actually destroy Ninevah (injured pride is the issue, it seems). He sits outside the city and asks to die. God makes a plant grow up to shelter him from the heat, and then the next morning the plant dies. Jonah complains again that he'd rather die than live under such conditions, and God replies that here's Jonah complaining about the death of a plant but not caring about the 120,000 people of Ninevah and (in a concluding line that stands out as both funny and profound) "also much cattle."

So chapter 3 contains the climax (though without the details that would make for suspenseful reading, in a modern sense), and chapter 4 is his return with the boon. Also in chapter 4, Jonah drifts back into his identity one last time, and God corrects him. The story doesn't say anything about his return to his home or what he brought with him, but the inclusion of this story in the Scriptures is itself proof of the boon -- which apparently includes the information that God loves all peoples and "even much cattle."

Now, the story of Jonah comes up literally constantly in the hymnography of the Church. Jonah's song in the belly of the whale is called for at every day's matins, and the hymnography refers incessantly to Jonah's "belly of the whale" experience as a parallel for Christ's death and resurrection.

Rabbit trail: If you want to know where Flannery O'Connor (The Complete Stories and Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works, among others) gets off having such bizarre and unorthodox characters as Christ figures, just take a look at Jonah. But back to the point.

Now, I don't want to go into, right here, how Christ's life is the prototype for the hero's journey, so let me just assert it and go on. But the Scriptures tell a number of hero's journeys. One is the story of mankind; another is the story of Christ himself. But here's the thing. For Christ's story (and maybe for man's story, too, but I'm not finished thinking about this), the death and resurrection are the midpoint, not the climax. The thing is, we don't know the climax. Beyond the indications from Scripture, we have only guesses and speculations about the harrowing of sheol, about breaking down the bars of death, about what Christ meant when he told the myrrhbearer not to touch him because he had not ascended to his father, about what the Ascension actually entailed.

But this isn't about the climax; it's about Jonah and the belly of the whale, and I'm done talking about that.

Word count, April 23

2008-04-24T06:56:00.001-07:00

Word count Tuesday, zero, zip, zingo. Bad me!

Word count Wednesday, 1,000, bringing the book total to 14, 400. The added words were all in the same scene where the story went its own way Monday, and now I've "discovered" that my characters are distant relatives of characters in another book I'm working on. This is either a fictionally appropriate and literarily fun thing that will enrich both stories or a complete, dead-end rabbit trail. I think it may be the former; I feel it's likely the latter. I'll fix it later? Or I'll dump it all in disgust?

Words of wisdom

2008-04-22T19:00:00.001-07:00

It's 6:45ish here in the land of sun and snow, where you have to ask whether that white stuff on the ground is the current form of spring shower (I blame global warming) or a drift of cherry blossoms -- anyway this would make great weather for my book, but it's fall, and Oregon fall is nothing like this -- but I'm meandering again --

Anyway, to begin again, it's 6:50ish Pacific Daylight Time, and I haven't started my daily word count (it's next up, really), but I have a word of wisdom from Patrick McLean of The Seanachai podcast. He, too, is working on a novel, and he observes that you have two good hours per day; the rest is paperwork.

He's a sparse podcaster -- having another life, which he details in the linked podcast. And if you like, I recommend his "Collections." And A Round on Werner is a story I haven't been able to delete from iTunes, because I listen to it every now and then for a slightly different take on the world.

I'll update with a word count later.

Word count, April 21

2008-04-21T16:46:00.001-07:00

Word count as of Monday, April 21 -- 1,000 for the day, and 13,400 for the project. I took Sunday off, and I think a day off once a week will do me good.

It was a hard thousand words, and I almost quit for the day after 500. The story took off on its own, and my protagonist took an action I expected to happen after the halfway mark. I think I'll give it its head for the time being and see where it goes. I can always add more to Act IIA or shuffle the scenes around, if this gut-level impulse turns out to be a rabbit trail.

Word count, April 19

2008-04-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

Word count as of Saturday, April 19 -- 1,125 for the day, and 12,300 for the project. I haven't made up my recent slackery, but progress continues.

A police interview gave an opportunity for backstory, but I haven't made nearly the deft use of it that Robert Penn Warren did. Still, as I keep reminding myself, I am exploring the territory; I am exploring the territory.

Weather symbolism entered, a placeholder, I hope, for something better, which I'll fix later.

Word count, April 18

2008-04-19T20:22:00.001-07:00

Word count as of Friday, April 18 -- only 650 for the day, but past 11,000 for the project.

Very bad writing, which is still better than no writing. My protagonist crossed the threshold into the special world.

I need to know a lot more about murder prosecution. I've got to do some field trips to the Oregon Supreme Court to see murder trial transcripts and I need to pay a visit to the Office Indigent Defense, who are the state's public defenders.

Word count, progress update

2008-04-18T14:10:00.001-07:00

At Christopher Vogler's workshop last weekend, he told about how he strengthened his resolve to finish his book, The Writer's Journey. It helped him, he said, to make the announcement outward -- to tell family and friends that he had decided to complete it -- and to make the announcement inward.

He compared the latter to shouting down a deep well in the center of himself, "I'm going to finish this book." He said that there are segments of the well that are out of alignment -- they are the places where we know why we don't want to, where we see what outcomes we fear, and so we don't necessarily get the message all along the well without some effort.

I've been working on my present project since last September. I've been futzing with the plot, mapping the second act so that I can get through the swamp, and I think I've reached a point where I can start the process of making a road through the journey.

I had written most of the first act -- the Ordinary World -- when I realized I needed to do some reworking, and I haven't been a complete slacker, only a partial one, and arguably going more or less along with it, though I might go a few days or even a week at times before getting back to it.

But I've decided to dive into that well. I've got 10K words written (counting what I've done this week), and if I write a thousand words a day, I should have a solid first draft in less than 90 days. A thousand words a day of first draft takes only about an hour or an hour and a half, because it require me to put my editor brain to sleep in the backseat and just write, write, write.

So I want to post progress reports on my mainstream women's fiction, to help me say accountable to myself and the world.

Monday -- 1,056 words
Tuesday -- 1,034 words
Wednesday -- 968 words
Thursday -- 150 words (I had work and stuff and didn't get to write until I was too tired to write)
Friday -- now has a 2,000-word goal.

A weekend with Christopher Vogler

2008-04-14T22:27:00.001-07:00

I've been a fan of Christopher Vogler since, I don't know, the '90s, maybe. The second edition of his classic storytelling handbook, The Writers Journey, has been on my bookshelf for a long time. I had been thinking it was probably time to update, but wasn't sure.

I picked up a copy last week so that I could get it signed when he spoke to the Oregon Writers Colony annual spring conference at the Sylvia Beach Hotel and the Newport Performing Arts Center in Newport last weekend.

It's mostly the same handbook that it's been -- his streamlined approach to Joseph Campbell's popularizing of The Hero's Journey for storytellers of all kinds. He's been a screenplay consultant for Disney Studios and all around Hollywood, but the principles work for novels also.

He's also added sections on catharsis, polarity, how the body signals whether the story is working, and the importance of trusting the path.

I haven't read those sections yet, however, because I got to page xvii of the introduction and ran across a concept that has revolutionized my approach to my own novel in progress. Here's what it is. He describes the story as existing in four movements, and each movement has its own motivation and goal. For example, in Act I, the hero wants to escape his boring life. He crosses the threshold at the beginning of Act II, and now in Act IIA, he wants to become familiar with the new world. In Act IIB, he is trying to escape from the special world, and in Act III, he brings back the knowledge or the gift that he acquired there.

As I lay in bed thinking about how that applied to various plots, I realized I was describing Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

More to the point of my story, it also worked with All the King's Men, which I've been comparing everything to over the past few weeks. Jack Burden's motivation -- and very profoundly inner motivations at that -- go through a metamorphosis that fits that description very well. In fact, divided along that pattern, it works out to a sort of thesis-antithesis-synthesis -- which was exactly the insight I needed to get through the Second Act Swamp.

It's hard to get through to the new appendices in a book when one sentence in the introduction has you mulling the concept for a week. It's like getting a bag of all-day suckers for Halloween.

Anyway Christopher Vogler is an affable, supportive teacher, and he's talking about a return engagement in the summer of 2009.

And for another look at story structure -- same concepts, different terminology -- check out this workshop by Vogler's fellow Hollywood screenwriting consultant Michael Hauge, July 12-13. See you there.

What does my character want?

2008-04-04T20:38:00.001-07:00

I don't think I'm the only novice novelist who has trouble coming up with where the character is at the beginning of the story and what she wants before she has the piano dropped on her head at the end of the first act.

My characters have been criticized (with justification) as being too passive. Readers have said that they had a hard time identifying with them -- a classic sign that their motivation is not clear enough.

I was mulling over this little problem today in light of my story in progress, currently called Murderer's Mom. I have a good set of problems for my protagonist (the "murderer's mom" of the title), but I'm having a hard time getting the events to fall into their structural inevitability. If my plot were a box, it would rattle.

And then I thought, how do you know what anybody really wants? Isn't it by what they do? The woman who works in the garden all the time wants, perhaps, to see her botannical design come to fruition, or else she wants the experience of the sun and damp and the smell of dirt on her hands. A man who wants to be a writer, writes. A woman who wants to live in an orderly dwelling might keep her house spotlessly clean, or perhaps spend all her time at the office, where she has control over her environment and the tasks that she needs to do. There are more possible manifestations than goals, but everybody wants something, and everybody's efforts to get it reveal what it is.

But more than that, and here's what gave me some new insights into my character's character, everybody who wants something, who makes choices to bring that something about, also shows it by not doing something else. The woman who works in her garden but doesn't keep her house very clean is saying something about what is and is not important to her. The man who has all the time in the world for his son but none for his daughter is saying something about his relationship with his son and with himself, as well as with his daughter. The man who turns down a well-paying job in order to become a cab driver is saying something about what he considers important and what he doesn't.

So here's my resolution. Every character worksheet (I have a dozen of them, and they are continually morphing) should have a line on it about what the character doesn't do and why.

Another backstory technique -- alternating chapters

2008-03-06T11:33:00.001-08:00

Adding to yesterday's thoughts on backstory, Cory Doctorow's podcast novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, uses a different method of revealing backstory.

Like Warren, he starts his novel in medias res and goes backward, after setting the hook, to establish a little about who his character is and why he's there.

A couple of differences, though. Doctorow opens the story at the character's crisis -- or the Inmost Cave in Hero's Journey lingo -- the character's darkest moment. His backstory begins at the beginning of the plot; he even leaves off the Ordinary World and begins with the first plot point, or the Entry into the New World (the traffic accident with the future girlfriend). Eastern Standard Tribe is a lighter novel than All the King's Men, and I'm sure Doctorow would be the first to point out that he's not a U.S. Poet Laureate writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. But there's a difference in audience as well, and Doctorow's futuristic tale of a man considering the value of smarts versus happiness has an edgy, post-modern feel to it, without so completely abandoning tiresome forms that he gives up the entire concept of story.

Short version: it works for what he's doing. Like Warren, he anchors his story in time and refers back to the story present as often as he needs to for the audience to remain oriented and involved. Like Warren, he faces the danger of losing audience interest because of the technique he's chosen, but he overcomes the danger though effective use of action, dialogue, scene, and characterization to open the backstory. One other factor working in his favor is the shortness of the work; it's easier for the attention-deprived reader (of whom I am first) to keep coming back, because the novel's very lightness promises that it won't be hard to pick up the thread again. (Contrast my tendency to set aside Umberto Eco novels, even ones I love, for months before picking them up and finishing them.)

Both Warren and Doctorow use an ironic touch that points out the incongruities of life. The humor helps in Warren's case to wash out any tinge of purple and in Doctorow's case to maintain a breezy, engaging style.

It's worth noting that both have first-person narrators, who receive the reader's permission to tell the story any way they please, as long as the writer, in his persona as narrator, keeps it interesting and keeps us unconfused. Both succeed. For the student of backstory, it's a good contrast to explore.

Backstory and the Call to Adventure

2008-03-05T19:11:00.001-08:00

Something remarkable about All the King's Men (earlier post on the subject here).

Between the Call to Adventure in disk 4, maybe, of 18 (here's a brief overview of the Hero's Journey and the stages; The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers is Christopher Vogler's indispensable handbook on using the monomyth in fiction and screenplay writing) and the Entry into the New World, which happens in disk 8 -- that is, between Willie Stark's demand that Jack Burden find something on the upright old judge and Jack Burden's first attempt to do so -- is roughly a quarter of the story.

That's not a measure of the passage of the plot, because Jack says that he begins the assignment the very next day. In the interim, the author gives backstory on all the relevant characters. It's the right place, because the reader has already been hooked into the story by the three disks on the drive to Willie's home in rural Louisiana, 1936, and in fact, the backstory sets the hook deeper. We know now why it's important to Willie (the Huey Long character) and Jack (the first-person protagonist) to destroy the judge. More, it reveals the stakes -- what's the worst that can happen if it all goes wrong? And Jack tells us just at the edge of the threshold, on disk 4, that it all does go wrong; almost everybody is dead by the time the narrator gets around to telling the tale.

But it's hard, as anyone will know who's ever tried to do it or has read with any sympathy an inexpert author's attempt to carry it off, to lay in a quarter of a novel in backstory without losing the way back to the present time. The writer is playing huge risks with the reader's sympathy (for the characters) and attention (many a book has been left on the table when the reader says, "Who? What? I give up"). It's easy for a writer to fall into a kind of, "Sit down and listen up. It's going to be good for you. This is what you need to know so you can get to the good part of the story." And readers (of whom I am first) are inclined to refuse anything that's good for us. If it doesn't taste like chocolate (or at least avocado), I'm off to look for something tastier.

Warren pulls it off by putting it in scene and dialogue and characterization that never feels like "description." I don't think he could have pulled it off without Jack Burden being the narrator. Warren anchors the flashbacks and flashforwards several times by returning to that day in 1936. The day becomes a sort of direction pole set up in the story, so that when we circle back, we know where and when we are. But his technique has the words, "Professional writer at work. Do not try this at home," written all over it.

On the other hand why not try it at home? A striving storyteller doesn't crash a car. He just fills pages with fiction that's too hard for him. But if you want to see an expert driver take a sport SUV through the slopes of the Andes, past volcanoes and roaring rivers and breath-stealing chasms, rent, buy, or check out this book.

Election-season reading

2008-03-02T17:58:00.001-08:00

Election season is a lot like Lent. It's a clash of ideals and pragmatics, where all the vices come out on display, partly because of the fierce effort to, at best, keep them at bay and, at worst, to hide them from the view of others. It's a time when people on one side of the aisle are tempted to uncharitable judgments against people on the other side of the aisle -- or, for that matter, their own side of the aisle.

Elections, like Lent, bring out the best and the worst in us. The best -- an honest and frequently sacrificial effort to bring good government to the people, as our Church calls us to pray several times a day:

Have mercy, O Lord, upon our president, and all in civil authority, and save them, together with the armed forces of our country. Give them peace and continual victory over injustice and evil in all places. May they keep Your holy Church secure, that all Your people may live calm and ordered lives in Your sight, in true faith and prayer, with godly deeds.

The worst -- a naked grab for power. The problem is -- and here's the reason so many good people want to hide under their pillows until it all goes away -- it's hard from the inside to see where public service has become a power grab, and it's hard from the outside to see when what appears to be a naked power grab might be a sincere act of public service. And vice versa.

So when I was browsing through my county library and found a copy of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men on CD, I picked it up because, having lived in Louisiana, I knew a little about Huey Long, because Robert Penn Warren had been a poet laureate of the United States and I was interested in how a poet would handle a novel, and because I had been comparing the populist governor and aspiring president to a certain candidate in the current race.

The reading has been even better than I anticipated. Warren, the poet, catches the rhythm of southern speech without even a tinge of purple. He shows the process of good intentions for public service turned to a naked grab for power. The reader, Michael Emerson, does the voices like someone who has lived all his life in Louisiana.

For a look at the political process that's uplifted just by the art of telling, as well as the reality that very little really changes from cycle to cycle (of course, the stakes are higher than we think; it's just that they're always higher than we think), I highly recommend this one.

UPDATE: OK, I'm stunned. The Michael Emerson who reads the book as if he's never been outside of Louisiana is the same Michael Emerson, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who plays the creepy Ben Linus on Lost. I've moved beyond impressed at his acting ability to awestruck.

A Novel Start Seminar: How to Disappear Completely

2008-02-27T21:55:00.001-08:00

I think I mentioned before I dropped off the face of the earth that I wanted to think through what makes a good beginning for a novel. And as a case in point, I thought Myke Bartlett's How to Disappear Completely: The Terrible Business of Salmon and Dusk was almost a textbook in hooking the reader and not letting up until the very end.

Now, How to Disappear is a podcast novel, which makes it almost a separate genre -- not quite as different as a film or a complete audio drama, but still an experience of the ear more than the eye. And what Bartlett brings to the genre is considerable -- a British accent, a flair for voices, the perfect music for bumpers and transitions. So it's fun to listen to. But bad audio can ruin a good story more easily than good audio can save a bad story, and How to Disappear is a good story.

Briefly, it's a sort of urban fantasy/noir detective with romance. And it's about parallel worlds -- an arena that has appealed to me ever since I fell in love with Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as a kid.

So how does Bartlett create a world so engaging that I can't stop listening to the story? That I record on CD and then "read" three times in a row, twice for entertainment and once for technique? The answer is the magic of the basics: characters you care about what happens to in situations that make you wonder how it will all turn out. A flair for detail and surprising situations. It doesn't hurt that his detectives are time travelers and that they seem to wander a territory like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

By the way, when I went looking for the website, I learned that the next in the Kilbey Salmon series, My Chalk Outline, has begun.

Thought for the day

2007-10-31T05:56:00.001-07:00

Writing a novel is like climbing stairs carrying a huge armload of laundry -- socks, underwear, sheets and towels, clothes for children and adults -- all the while wearing (among other things) high heels and tiara.

What's Going On?: The game

2007-09-22T10:16:00.001-07:00

A black man and a black woman stand on a street corner in inner but not Downtown Portland. She is talking with animated, but not wild gestures. (This is where her racial background is relevant; blacks tend to use bigger gestures than people of, for example, northern European descent.)

I had the length of the stoplight to ask, Is she angry? At the man she's talking to? What's their relationship? What's his reaction?

By the time I got my last glimpse, I had concluded that she was talking about something that angered her at the time, but now was an entertaining story. She had a residue of anger, but it was not directed at the man she was talking to. She knew the man, but he was a neighbor, a co-worker whom she had happened to run into, not a husband, brother, anything close like that. The man was enjoying the story.

But because I had been reading How to Read a Person Like a Book, I could take a little extra time and ask what I was basing the conclusions on.

First, the relationship. They stood at a 45-degree angle to each other, "open" to others joining the conversation, and their foreheads were not tense. The man had his ear turned attentively to the woman, and he was smiling slightly.

The anger was in the gestures, forceful, chopping motions, not arm-waving. Movements that if she had been angry at the man would have had her poking him in the chest. But she deflected them downward at the last instant. The object of her anger was absent.

Reading body language is for me at the core of people watching, and for a writer it can be an asset in characterization. If the author wants a character to reveal something without saying it, he can say it in movement. It's all part of "show, don't tell," and if, for example, a the writer wants to reveal that a child is afraid of her mother, she can flinch when another woman reaches out to stroke her hair. She can tend to stay to the side and behind adults.

Attraction, revulsion, desire, skepticism, boredom. We're always talking, even when we don't say anything. And we're always reading, if we pay attention, even if we haven't made use of a book to verbalize results.

Just for fun, check out a couple of paintings, Breaking Home Ties and Nighthawks and ask the questions: Who are they? Where are they coming from and where are they going? What is their relationship? How do they feel? And how do you know what you know?

And then at the mall or on the street corner, the game continues, and characters say more than they ever could in words.

I'm reading a book

2007-09-20T11:25:00.001-07:00

More thoughts on my most recent post about entering fictional worlds.

When I -- and probably a lot of people -- am reading a book and not in the story's world, I'm evaluating. It might be grammar, story structure, character, whether the "facts" of the story are believable, whatever. The critical sense is antithetical to the dream state. And when new writers show somebody their story, they sometimes get critiqued on a lot of things that wouldn't be noticed if the reader had been in the story world. And it's not so much that the noted critiques are wrong, but if the new writer were to fix all these little critiques without addressing the world problem, then the next read will bring more of the same level of critiques, often telling the writer to change back the things he just fixed. If the story works, the critiquer wakes from the dream after some block of pages and says, "Oh, that's right. I'm supposed to be critiquing this."

But one reader's dream state is another's crock of mush. Although many of the Da Vinci Code's kajillion readers experienced that dream state, my memory of that book is white pages wrapped by a red cover. Ho hum. My memory of A Suitable Boy is sprawling Indian landscapes, Hindu festivals, the Ganges River, a Mumbay cemetery in the rain. Yes, also words on a page, but clear memories of things I've seen only through those pages.

At the same time, take a writer like Umberto Eco. I love his books. I love his writing. And though I often lose myself in the world, frequently, he kicks me out with a sentence that makes me want to walk around the block and think about how the world is organized. I had to start marking the text of Baudolino with referents to his thoughts about the nature of truth and lies, what's real, and the "reality" of story. Eco reminds me that I'm "reading a book," and I don't mind it. It's part of what I enjoy about him.

On beginning a novel

2007-09-18T21:18:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about stories about crossing over into other worlds. It's a staple of the fantasy genre -- if the character is not born in this alternative universe, he has to get there somehow, whether it's by falling down a rabbit hole, stepping through a magical post in the train station, finding an opening in the back of a wardrobe or an invisible door into the London Underground. In fact, there are too many such stories to mention, and I'd like to try to understand what they mean.

But I think one thing that is true about these doors into elsewhere is that they're a metaphor for the story itself. What every storyteller does, when we do our task, is draw the reader/viewer/listener into this other world -- whether past or future, a locale exotic or mundane, set among the glittering wealthy or the seamy underside. The story reader is in a sort of dream state. He doesn't see what's around him but instead sees Hogwarts or Middle Earth or a space odyssey or Edwardian England, sees them so clearly, in fact, that he remembers them as if they happened to him, as if they are happening to him.

It's why overwhelmed and overworked agents and publishers can tell in a page or two -- or even a sentence or two -- whether they're going to be interested.

The author has to drag the reader, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the story. He does that by creating a world and giving the reader a reason to stay and see what's going to happen next.

The world is created by the texture of sensory details and the incantation of language. The world is the basis, but the question holds a reader in an ill-drawn world better than a well-drawn world with no story.

The question comes from characters -- who want something, need something, face trouble of some kind; and the magic world promises that the answer waits around the next corner. But behind that answer waits an even bigger question, and so on and so on until the questions are answered.

When the dream breaks, when the reader wakes and thinks, "Ah, it's only a dream," and the story, the world, is imperiled. When the reader observes, "Oh, yes. I'm reading a book," it may bring about the end of the unwinding of the story in that person's universe.

Of course readers "know" they're reading a book, and I'm not literally asking them to lose touch with reality (although I've missed an occasional bus stop because I forgot about the world I was supposed to be navigating). But back to the practical implications for the author.

Every word, every detail from the beginning of page 1 should conspire to envelop the reader in the story. The text has to be real, sensory, emotionally evocative. The characters must be there from the beginning, with their fears, their danger, their terrible trouble.

The following are some items of advice I've gleaned from years of unsuccessful noveling. If they can be of help to anyone else, that's great. At worst, they will be a reminder to me of what to look for on the next draft.

Don't start with the character's name. The reader has no reference for it, no emotional content, so it's just squiggles on the page. Let us be curious about the person's name before we get it.

That's why it works so much better to start with a flyover concept: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Pride and Prejudice). "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (Anna Karenina). "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Not only is it broadly true -- or at least debatable -- but it hits at the depth of our own experience (OK, most people haven't faced a firing squad or remembered the day we discovered ice, but we can identify with our childhood memories coming back to us at the hour of our death -- a nice twofer by Marquez). Not everybody can write one of the greatest sentences in literary history, but we all can aim high.

Marquez's twofer above captures a character in trouble. It's been a while since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I don't thing he got back to Col. Aureliano Buendia's facing the firing squad for another hundred or more pages. I didn't care. I was hooked into the world that I can still see when I remember it.

The character needs a goal or a problem or a goal and then a problem or a problem added to a goal complicated by another problem. If everything's OK, why do you need me along? the reader thinks, and goes back to the television -- or real life.

Not an exhaustive list, but it's all I know right now. Maybe I'll get back to it later, when I learn some more.

A garden of music

2007-08-16T17:50:00.001-07:00

One of my favorite places in the world is the Portland Chinese Garden. It's a block surrounded by some of the busiest streets in Portland. On one side is an office building; on another a single-room-occupancy hotel; just a couple of blocks away are the downtown post office and the train station. And in this garden is a paradise -- a place of calm quiet, still water, an ever-changing landscape of growing, blooming, dying, and rebirthing plants, with a tea house where hours can pass without my ever noticing them.

On a day last week, we heard jazz pianist Randy Porter play there. There were maybe a hundred or more people sitting in chairs around the garden and the music drifted out across the water, where the locuses bloomed huge and pink on tall stems. The garden seemed small for the first time, with the office building across the street forming a backdrop to the "Flowers Bathing in Spring Rain" pavillion (fortunately, August in Portland is not a time of spring rain). My husband and I remembered long walks in our former neighborhood in Lake Oswego, when we would walk by a house on our street and hear astonishingly beautiful piano music being played, which we later learned (after we moved) actually was Randy Porter.

So it was a evening of great music in my favorite garden, with a chance to round out our Porter collection and catch up on the old neighborhood with Randy's wife, who ran the CD sales table.

A speculation on Transfiguration (reprise)

2007-08-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

In honor of tomorrow's Feast, I've dug out a 2005 speculation on the Transfiguration. It starts with a metaphor and ends with "What if" and meanders through time, literature, heaven and earth, and the Communion of the Saints to arrive at the meeting of Christ, Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor. It's quite long, and if it's not comprehensible, I'll give you your money back. Here goes.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man reading a book.

Time in the book marches according to its own inexorable rhythm, and the reader may experience it sequentially, page by page, in his imagination coming to the events one by one as the characters do. But when he closes the book, all of the book time is contained between the two covers. The reader exists on the same plane as the Author of the book, but the reader is not the author, and the author knows the book and the characters and the backstory and the motivations in ways that the reader can only begin to appreciate.

Within the book, the characters experience their own day-to-day reality. In post-modern novels, characters may speculate about the author, and even about readers, but even in those explorations of the boundary between the book world and the reader's world, the protagonist can never turn and look the reader in the eye.

That's the book as we know it, in our feeble and childish attempts to imitate the work of our own Author.

The cosmos is an unimaginably enormous book, and time exists within the book, from the big bang to black holes. (I almost said the "universe is an unimaginably enormous book," but I changed it to "the cosmos," because I think the universe is the raw material, and the cosmos is the story, but that's a diversion.)

Our reality, as characters, is as limited and insubstantial as is the reality of David Copperfield compared to the living, breathing, suffering, learning human being reading about him. The difference is that, unlike Dickens, our Author was able to give us free will and complexity far beyond what writers can give their characters (although novelists will insist that their characters frequently surprise them), and our Author was able to make the boundary between the reader and the book crossable.

The Bible tells many stories of those boundary crossings. Enoch, Moses and Elijah are among those of the Old Testament who disappeared from the earth after a lifetime of "walking with God." They left the book.

Other prophets received communication from God, messages from the Author to His characters, telling them what was required to survive the book. What it takes, basically, is that we act in the knowledge that the book is not all there is. "Character is what you do when nobody's looking," goes the old saw; but the reader knows the protagonist's agonizing decision, and it matters whether the protagonist chooses right or wrong. Someone is always watching.

And then ("then" in book time), the Author did an extraordinary thing. He became subject to the rules of his own book. Not as king and commander -- "Hmm, I think I'll write in a couple of legions of angels to get me out of this mess" -- but subject to the conditions his characters face. In the Garden of Gesthemene, we see a divine crisis and what a lovely irony, what a dazzling nested narrative that 2,000 years later (in book time) we "watch" Christ's agony in the garden, preserved in a book. Another rabbit trail. I'll go on.

The Communion of the Saints, the "great cloud of witnesses," is made up of those who have survived the book -- past, present and future in book time. I don't know how or even if time operates outside the book, but I'm quite sure that it's not the same. They pray for us, within the book, because they experience our agonizing crises with us. We pray for them -- that is for those within the book -- because even though we are within the book, we understand that there is a reality outside the book, and so we can agonize in the crisis of our grandparents 80 years ago. And of course, the Author generates the book, and the characters experience it, but don't know how many drafts it has gone through -- or is going through now -- to arrive at the proper form.

OK, I think I've arrived at the Feast of Transfiguration. The story is that Jesus took his disciples Peter, James and John up Mount Tabor, where they saw him clothed in light, and they saw Elijah and Moses talking with him. Luke says they were talking about his death, "which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem."

Now at the vespers for the Feast of Transfiguration, there are three appointed Old Testament readings: Exodus 24:12-18; Exodus 33:11-23, 34:4-6, 8; and 1 Kings 19:3-9, 11-13, 15-16. They are accounts of Moses' and Elijah's face-to-face encounters with God. In the first reading, God calls Moses to Mount Sinai to receive the Tablets of the Law. There's a huge brightness on the mountain, like a devouring fire, and Moses is in the midst of it. In the second reading, Moses asks to see God's face, and God hides him in the cleft of a rock and shows him his back, because no one can see God's face and live. In the third reading, Elijah goes to Mount Horeb, and there's a wind and an earthquake and a fire and a still small voice, and the Lord was in the still, small voice.

At last I'm arriving at my speculation: What if the disciples were witnessing the conversations between God and Moses and between God and Elijah that were recorded in the Old Testament. What if, in both of those events, the prophets went outside time, outside the book and met Christ, who had also crossed the boundary of the book.

The Lord was about to lead the Israelites into their new land, and Moses wonders if they should go on. It was a time of crisis. God responds by saying "I will make all My goodness pass before thee."

Elijah has just destroyed the prophets of Baal, and Jezebel has him in the crosshairs. He wonders if he should go on. We're not told what the still, small voice said, but it was enough to strengthen Elijah.

Luke says they talked about Christ's death that "he was to accomplish," which means they talked about it not as a defeat but as a victory. What better way to encourage the faint-hearted prophets than to show them how their struggle fits into the grand scale of things?

It could have happened that way. It's certainly recorded that God breached the barrier between the cosmos and the greater world beyond the book. So what if the accounts could be three views of the same encounter?

What if?

When genres collide

2007-08-03T15:13:00.001-07:00

I know it's been done from science fiction to western (as in the television series Firefly and Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day). But Steve Ely's introduction to "Cloud Dragon Skies" talked about how often science fiction is about meeting the unknown, which is also the focus of all stories of exploration, colonization and making a life far from the home civilization, which also describes westerns.

Given that backdrop, when I listened to this 1955 podcast of an episode from the western, Fort Laramie, from Vintage Radio, I thought, just for fun, I would pretend I was listening to science fiction. For a long time, I've liked science fiction and not much liked westerns. Now, I think maybe there's no difference. Past, future, this world, that planet, Native Americans, Native Martians, colonists living in fear and danger from the others and from their own people, good and bad guys on both sides. Try it on the next western you see -- whether this one or some other. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Literary agent gives free e-book on the dreaded query

2007-07-30T20:14:00.001-07:00

Literary agent and author Noah Lukeman has posted a 100-page e-book (PDF format) titled How to Write a Great Query Letter.

He's one of the top agents in the business, and free advice from someone of his caliber is very welcome.

Which font should I use?

2007-07-09T05:46:00.000-07:00

The last writer to arrive at the workshop, a 50-something medical professional, is an attractive woman with large earnest eyes. Under her arm, she carries an 800-page manuscript (I'm estimating a 250,000 to 300,000 word count) that she's planning to pitch at an upcoming writers' conference.

At the end of the Q&A period at the end of the workshop, the woman asks a question about her manuscript: "Does this font work for the Chinese?"

Huh?

As it turns out, in her sprawling landscape of a novel, her characters speak French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and Chinese. Oh, and English. And the way she's chosen to reveal this in her manuscript is to have a different font for each language. And it's not a Chinese scene and then a Hebrew scene; it's a quote of Chinese, in the Chinese font, followed by "he said" (or whatever) in the English font.

I've been told by publishing professionals that a first-time novelist is going to have a hard time selling a manuscript over 100,000 words. And I've run into writers who insist that their manuscript can't be cut. I don't know of any of them who broke in with that book. There are exceptions, I'm sure.

But various fonts?

Well, it was necessary to the narrative, she replied. She didn't want to know if it was a good idea to use all those fonts, only if the Chinese was OK. When the workshop leader said it was a little hard to read, she said that it was the best she could find, suggesting that the correct answer was to have been, "Yes, it's a lovely font."

Writers, if your story seems to demand a different font for various speakers, figure out a way to write the information into the text. The writer I'm speaking of has piled up the odds against herself so profoundly that this writers' conference is going to go down as a learning experience rather than an opportunity to sell her book.

But note to self: How often I've been in the position of that writer. Taking on a large and difficult task, figuring out how to do it without getting help or advice, and then committing myself to my jerry-rigged approach -- at the expense of my larger goal -- even when I get an opportunity to get the help I needed. It's hard to turn back from that dead end and find the way that goes all the way through. It seems so much more efficient to keep hacking against that brick wall, because this path looked like the only one open.

Note to self: Stop, listen, and consider advice, even if it seems uncomprehending and stupid, because it might save me some trouble.

Compossible

2007-06-28T16:55:00.001-07:00

Anu Garg's word of the day today "compossible" exactly describes a new serendipity in my novel.

To give a brief update, a while back, I had a chance to attend a Michael Hauge workshop in Portland. Michael is a Hollywood screenplay consultant whose clear and usable explanations of story structure make his workshop one of the best I've ever attended. And his application of story structure to the character arc -- the distinction between a character's identity and essence -- works for real people, as well as fictional characters. When I told my friend Barbara about it, she compared his approach to Thomas Merton's view of the true and and the false self. She half-jokingly suggested that we invite Michael Hauge to give a talk at our church. Michael would be -- surprised -- I think, at such an invitation, but since then, I've been noticing how that comes up in Church literature. That would be a long blog post in itself, and it's not what I wanted to talk about today.

A few weeks later, Larry Brooks, a student of Michael's who writes thrillers and lives here in Oregon, gave a coaching workshop. Nine writers sat around a table and spun our stories for each other. We didn't read text; instead, we gave the plot overview and talked about how to strengthen our stories and our characters. We asked each other the annoying questions: "But why does it have to be that way?" and "What if you did it this way?" It was enormously productive, and hearing all these stories, even in embryonic form, was like belonging to a storytellers' club. (By the way, if there's a critique group in the Portland area that's open to doing story structure this way and that has an opening . . . .) And having my own story dissected, having someone not emotionally attached to the thing look at the structure, opened my eyes to new ways of solving problems that have plagued it since the beginning.

So I've been going through my story and inserting a plot. The most important thing -- the thing worth doing the story for -- is the theme, but Larry said that if the theme is important, you put it aside and tell your story and trust it to carry the theme when all is said and done. Otherwise, you risk driving the story to tell what you want to tell. My problem was that the action wasn't strong enough to keep the reader interested. And since I'm plotting first and writing later, I can experiment with different things without investing so much time in the writing and rewriting and so forth.

So I'm looking at making the story something that you could tell to a group of people around a campfire and have them all hanging on every word. I'm also looking for good scenes -- as for example Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. In other words, fun scenes, exciting story, compelling characters, profound theme. Sound like a tall order? I think so, too.

So where was I? Compossible. Right.

Anyway, I heard Linda Seger interviewed on the podcast The Writing Show. Seger suggested that when your character needs to do something important in the story, brainstorm a list of 30 or more possibilities. The first two or three will be predictable, she said. After that, you get into more surprising possibilities. The list of 30 ways Protagonist might escape from prison will then include such things as being beamed up by aliens, having the prison decide he's not really guilty, blowing things up, stealing guards' uniforms and so forth. I sort the final list into "Heh" (beamed up by aliens); "Nah" (setting him loose); "Maybe" (blowing things up, stealing uniforms); and "Yeah" (there may not be any). But the what's been happening is that the list contains two or three compossible "Maybe"s that add up to a big ding-ding-ding-ding! "Yeah."

Lines from a deposition

2007-06-03T20:55:00.001-07:00

I just love this stuff. I'm proofreading a deposition in which the attorney is asking the plaintiff in an automobile accident case about what happened immediately after the accident:

Q. And did you say anything to your wife?
A. I asked her how she was doing. We were obviously a little shook up and sore. But, you know, she was really concerned about her little dog we had just got.
Q. How was the little dog?
A. I think it's okay. Didn't say anything to us.
Q. Does your dog have the ability to speak?
A. It does not, no.

For more, go to the Say What? blog.

Which way is up?

2007-05-04T14:50:00.001-07:00

The artist and her friends were placing artworks in the Starbucks gallery (hung on the coffee shop walls for sale).

They were bold, colorful oil paintings with bright yellows, oranges, purples. One of the women mentioned how much she liked the "fish" painting, but if there was a representation of a fish, I didn't see it.

As I sat there trying to plan chapter 4 of my book, they wandered around the shop, looking for the right place to put the paintings.

One of the friends took a 2 x 2 1/2 canvas that may have been of a bouquet of irises and tulips -- or not -- and hung it in a vertical orientation between two windows. "That looks really good," she said, and several others agreed.

The artist stood back apiece. "Well, it's sideways," she said, and seeing me watching, she gave a friendly nod and shrug. "I guess it doesn't matter which way the dedication hangs."

And while I admired her flexibility, it was a different way of looking at art from what I would have expected. I would have thought that vertical/horizontal orientation, rightside up/upside down, would be important, would be crucial to a visual artist. Apparently, I was mistaken.

And taking a cue from the flexible artist in Starbucks, I give my permission to my readers -- if I ever finish this darned thing and if anybody actually does read it -- to read the book rightside up, upside down, sideways, forward or backward -- whatever works best with the available wall space and light.

Just forget the giant beach umbrella

2007-04-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

I don't have the time or skill to photoshop this, so you'll just have to use the imagination God gave you: Our lovely blue planet, wearing fashion shades and a pink bikini, enjoys the cosmic beach under a giant space-based beach umbrella.

A little further out, Mars, wearing a muscle shirt but still sunburned bright red, wiggles around in his orbit to try to stay in the shade of earth's umbrella.

In the meantime Pluto and his new friends are chasing sticks into the primal deeps.

Just another fun day in the Milky Way.

But forget it. The bean counters at the UN actually found a program that they thought would be too expensive for the value to be gained from it. Fancy that. Maybe Al Gore would be willing to pay for it.

H/T: Fr. Joseph.

Quiet time at Orthodox Writers Week

2007-04-27T14:14:00.001-07:00

We have been very, very good today. We sit in our little worlds, arrayed on couches, benches, on the beach, with our laptops, manuscripts, notebooks in hand.

Quiet, please. We are birthing. Articles, books, poetry, a more conscious life. Gloria in her headphones is encased in a sphere of music. I don't hear it. Katherine turns the pages of a loose-leaf binder. Earlier this morning, she was organizing; now her fingers dance across the keys. Behind me, Andrew sits with a laptop at the big wooden dining table. He is pensive, conversing with the muse. After a long walk at the beach, Barb emerges with notebooks and clean socks.

And I -- I have stopped 600 words into my goal of 1,000 at this sitting to tell you, O Excellent Reader, what you're missing.

Outside, the sun shines, and the ravens and blackbirds laugh and sing, and the ocean whispers its secrets to the sand on the beach.

But we are very, very quiet.

Repeat after me: 'It's only a novel'

2007-04-16T21:20:00.001-07:00

Apparently, Stephen King's Cell got to Afghanistan, says the Scotsman:

WORRIED Afghans switched off their mobile phones yesterday as rumours spread that a deadly virus could be contracted by answering calls from "strange numbers".

Thinking? Me?

2007-04-16T20:54:00.000-07:00

What can I say? Despite my recent dearth of writings, Father Joseph has decided to nominate me for a Thinking Blog Award. And this is the sort of award that a nomination is a win (which may be true of many awards, but that's a rabbit trail I won't follow today).

Quoting Father Joseph, here are the instructions:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

Well, the fact that Father Joseph has pointed you this way means that he can't be one of my picks, but just for the record, he would be, otherwise.

And he named another of my favorites, Get Religion, so that's out, too.

But the truth is, I've been focused on audio lately. I write a column for the Oregon Court Reporters Association newsletter, and I spend a lot of time with earbugs, frequently sitting behind a steno machine. So I'll figure that the chain of "thinking" bloggers will spread out to many writers worth reading, so I'll point to a few worth listening to.

The first is a back-at-you at Father Joseph, whose accent is not quite as Southern as I expected it to be, but whose commentary is full of everyday insights that validate the "wit and wisdom" promised on the Ancient Faith promo (that Father Joseph laughs about).

Another is the podcast SF magazine, Escape Pod. Founder and host Steve Ely has put together a professional-quality anthology of weekly stories (they've also added a horror and a fantasy edition, neither of which I've listened to yet) that manage to be at once thought provoking and fun.

Yet another is the Sonic Society, a vast aural conspiracy to bring "audio cinema" to English speakers from around the world ("We are legion").

Through the Sonic Society, I've found such treasures as Black Jack Justice and The Red Panda -- new radio programs in the Old Time Radio tradition with exactly the right mix of earnestness and tongue in cheek -- at Decoder Ring Theatre. They're between seasons just now, but that gives you time to catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 before they come back for (I hope) the third.

Finally is an experiment that maps the capabilities of podcast fiction: The Failed Cities Monologues. Lots of authors have written their stories in "different voices," but Matt Wallace and crew take the concept of voice to a whole new platform in this dystopian tale of loyalty, betrayal, tenderness, brutality, and the question of what it takes to get by.

So there are my nominees. Thanks for the kudos, Father Joseph, and I'll do my best to dust off my keyboard a little more productively in the future.

What we miss

2007-04-07T17:54:00.001-07:00

Washington commuters missed a treat recently when the professional violinist Joshua Bell played a free concert in a subway station. Incognito, one of the world's best violinists played some of the world's best music on one of the world's best violins. For whatever reason -- context, time pressures, distraction -- most, vastly most, of the people missed it entirely. Didn't look, didn't stop for a concert that they could have paid $100 for a seat to watch, didn't notice the gift.

Washington Post magazine, which arranged the concert or stunt or whatever you want to call it, has a really good story about it, along with video and interviews with the people who did stop and why. The article is well worth a full read.

It's a reminder of how much we can miss by not being there, where we are, and of the wonders in drab clothing that can happen anywhere, anytime, if we're not so distracted that we miss it.

H/T: Miss Snark

New Onion Dome posted

2007-03-10T13:19:00.001-08:00

The new Onion Dome has a piece inspired by a visit from -- I hope -- our new bishop.

OK, so the synapses do weird things when I see a resplendently robed man, who looks something like a cross between Santa Claus and Jerry Garcia, periodically emerge from the Royal Doors and bless the congregation.

But it's wonderful to have a bishop that I would trust to enjoy the image.

A Poem for Librivox

2007-03-03T20:32:00.000-08:00

I've been enjoying Librivox audio books for many months now and finally had an opportunity to pay back a minute and 53 seconds of my debt. It's Robert Frost's poem, "After Apple-Picking." Tell me how you think it went.

Orthodox* Writers' Week 2007

2007-01-20T21:49:00.000-08:00

Coming up April 23-29, 2007, the second annual Orthodox* Writers' Week at the Beach.

Featuring:

NO program
NO speakers
NO required activities
Time to work on the project of your choice
Miles of beach to walk
Fellowship of others engaged in the same effort
Morning prayer (readers’ matins)

Price:
Full week: $60 plus $35 annual membership in Oregon Writers Colony
Less than a week: $20 per night plus $35 annual membership in Oregon Writers Colony
Family-style dinners prepared cooperatively by participants (there are grocery stores nearby); on your own for breakfast and lunch, whether at a nearby diner or in the house kitchen.

Location:

At the beautiful and quirky Oregon Writers Colony Colonyhouse in Rockaway Beach, Oregon (between Cannon Beach and Tillamook).

Download a flyer (in PDF format).

* You don't have to be Orthodox. You just have to be able to put up with us for a week.

A curious thank-you

2007-01-03T16:24:00.000-08:00

The TV was blaring something about a school shooting when I walked into the waiting room at the car repair shop this morning. The two men already sitting there weren't watching -- one was reading the newspaper, and the other was doing something that involved a legal pad and a pen -- and I was approaching the thrilling conclusion of a Wilkie Collins novel.

The remote lay on a table beside the chair where I sat, so I held it up, asked a quick permission and turned the TV off.

Time passed. The man with the legal pad paid for his oil change and headed for the door. "Thanks for turning off Fox," he said pleasantly, as he closed the door behind him, leaving me wondering if he would have been quite so friendly about my turning off The View.

Just say No

2007-01-02T22:41:00.000-08:00

Words of wisdom from Tracey: "If you're ever at your prayers and you're suddenly struck with an idea for a brand new icon, just wait for it to go away."

Here's an illustration of what happens when someone ignores that advice.

It's an "icon" of all the special people riding in the big boat.

On the ground are bad people sniping and shooting and pointing spears and generally exercising hostility at all the special people riding in the big boat.

That's supposed to be Martin Luther looking like an Old West stagecoach robber. And proving that this iconographer has read his Hal Lindsey, we have the anti-Christ hanging out with a "king" of Israel and the Harlot of Babylon. Over there is the pope, not any specific pope, but a generic Pope. Oh, and the "prophet" who must not be named. And on the far right is Patriarch Athenagoras, who committed the sin of talking to a pope, which makes him the "father of ecumenism" -- which is pretty remarkable, considering that the ecumenical movement is rooted in the 19th century.

The marketers of this illustration are very good at pointing out the dangers of ecumenism, but not so good at noticing the dangers of hopping from boat to increasingly smaller boat in search of the one so small that it will hold only the people sufficiently holy to be part of their world.

But what do I know? By their definition, I'm not Orthodox either.

This is part of the reason why, when someone says, "I don't like organized religion," I'm inclined to say, "Have I got a Church for you."

Political Shibboleths

2006-12-27T19:46:00.000-08:00

The man who sat on the mall bench next to me was in his late 70s, maybe, or early 80s, no doubt taking a break, as I was, after having been outshopped by his companion. I had taken Jayden out of the stroller to stretch his legs, and he sat on my lap behaving like an exceedingly cute 1-year-old.

So that was the scene when the man sat down and made conversation with Jayden, said he'd retired from the Air Force, mentioned his recent back surgery; we exchanged the names of our home towns; and casting about for another topic of conversation, he said that the government spends too much money.

I had turned Jayden around on the bench, and he was watching with fascination the people go by below. The man, thinking I had missed his topic, tried again: "Congress spends too much of our money."

Thinking about it later, I realized that there were many things I could have said: "Preach it, brother!" or "What programs do you disagree with?" or "It seems to be what the voters want them to do." Or even, "I don't talk politics [although it's not "politics," strictly speaking, but policy; anyway] with strangers; pick another." But what came out was, "..."

My first thought was why am I such a loghead? But if he had had a specific policy issue, we might have had a conversation. But too often, these entrees aren't about conversation; they're about finding out if the other person is one of us or one of them. I suspect that I might have been "us" to the man, but I hate being "us" that way even more than I hate being "them."

I know a man who plays this game with every person he meets -- and he meets a lot of people. I'm among "them" to him, and when he finds a kindred political soul, they ramp up the rhetoric together in a sort of bondng ritual. It's not persuasive -- there's no need to persuade, because the assumption is that being "us," we already agree; if we had to persuade each other, we wouldn't be "us."

I wonder how much the state of our political discourse comes back to the inanities people proclaim when they're trying to find fellow members of their political clans.

How much more appealing just to stare over the railing at the many fascinating people walking about below.

We need a little (more) Christmas

2006-12-24T22:27:00.000-08:00

"Happy Holidays!" the chirpy voice rang out the last weekend of November. "Welcome to McDonald's."

Well, happy holidays to you, too. Any particular holiday? Arbor Day? Third Finding of the Head of John the Baptist? Of course, I didn't say that, just gave my order and drove on through.

I sat out the Chrismas wars this year, though I saw with some gratification that the secularists made a few strategic retreats. I don't put much stock in corporate-designated holiday greetings; I'd rather hear what bubbles forth from the clerk's heart, whether it's Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Kwanzaa, or Bah Humbug.

But it's been an interesting season. The late Oriana Fallaci declared herself a "Christian atheist." Dennis Prager, a Jew, gets himself lambasted for defending the civic and cultural importance of the Christian Bible. Seattle puts the Christmas trees back into the airport. "Tidings of comfort and joy" -- or are they?

I don't want to belittle any of the efforts and sacrifices of our fellow combatants for freedom of religion in the public square. But I think it's necessary to note that the Christmas of the public square -- with or without the permission of the ACLU -- is not all there is. And the fact that someone needs to note that shows how far, perhaps, the secularists have encroached on Christmas.

One example: Steve Ely of Escape Pod (an SF audio magazine that is a weekly favorite of mine) introduces the Christmas podcast -- a story about how Santa solves some management problems -- with a brief anecdote about how he's not religious but his son has shown him the value of Christmas. If I can give joy and fun and sparkly things to my son, he said -- not in those words, but that's the gist of it -- then why should I deny it to him because of my temptation to think of it as humbug. And by giving it to him, I get a little of it back myself. It's a wise and deeply true statement and yet it reveals the gap between Christmas revealed by angels on a night some 2,000 years ago and Christmas as it's come to be practiced some 2,000 years later.

We think of Christmas as a Hallmark special -- when wandering adults come home to aging parents, enemies reconcile, children get the miraculous gift that they most dearly need. And although all those things are good, and one can find scriptural bases for all those stories -- at the end the stories are too frequently cut off from their moorings, like buoys marking the location of sunken treasure whose ropes are cut, leaving searchers wandering dark waters to find bobbing indicators pointing to nothing.

"Peace!" "Joy!" and "Hope!" the Christmas cards say, and who can argue with peace, joy and hope? Except "peace" is defined as an absence of botherment; "joy" as the Christmas mood, manufactured by weeks of songs about snow and Christmas, some pine-scented candles and a lot of red and green decorations; "hope" as that present -- profound or trivial -- that Santa brings.

I don't mean to denigrate any of that. "Christmas is for children," the secular Christmas celebrators say, "and for the child in all of us," some of them add. And again, who can argue with such a profound truth? Except that, again, it's cut loose from the moorings. Yes, Christmas is about literal quiet, punctuated by songs, marked by the smells that hinge to memories in the human mind, the red and green colors pointing to life, and the gifts pointing to the gifts the Magi or the Gift that is Christ himself. Everything we do is for the kids -- to make clear to them what the holiday means and to remind ourselves year in and year out what the holiday means. God became incarnate -- God became meat (go 48 minutes into the linked podcast for a five-minute-long SF story that captures the wonder, the scandal of Christmas without apparently even being aware of it), with all the botherment, pain and suffering, and despair of earthly success that entailed for Him.

No wonder people get angry, frustrated, cynical, and depressed about Christmas. They go into the season expecting a Hallmark Christmas; they pull up the buoys and find nothing attached. The buoys aren't bad or wrong, but the ropes have been cut. If Santa represents neither the historical St. Nicholas nor the Gift of Love from God to us, then he easily becomes a Bad Santa, hating children and mocking everything good. If Christmas light isn't the Light that enlightens every human soul, then Christmas can become Black Christmas, a time of fear and death.

The old civil celebration used to help maintain the ropes -- the Nativity scenes, the old carols. They weren't enough alone, but combined with the religious practice of ordinary people they were a net benefit. But now we feel as if we've gotten away with something when a school choir gets to sing "We Need a Little Christmas," when we can put a Nativity scene in public, casting Santa Claus among the Wise Men, when the Salvation Army gets to ring bells outside a shopping mall. Again, not bad, not bad, not bad, but not enough. And not enough even to indicate that there's more.

In fact, that's the saddest part of it. Not that people hear and reject, but that they don't hear, that they think they comprehended Christmas when they were 8 years old and waiting for that special doll or baseball glove, that they don't understand that Christmas is a feast for the intellect as well as for the body and for the senses, and that the totality of it is a feast for the spirit.

Your Nativity, O Christ our God,
Has shown to the world the light of wisdom,
For by it those who worshiped the stars were taught by a star
To adore you, the Sun of righteousness,
and to know you, the Orient from on high.
O Lord, glory to you.

Today the Virgin gives birth to Him who is above all creation,
And the earth gives a cave to Him who is unapproachable,
Angel and shepherds sing Your glory,
And Wise Men journey with star,
Since for our sake, He has come as a newborn child, who from all eternity is God.

Merry Christmas to all.

Best-laid plans

2006-12-19T07:35:00.000-08:00

So I get home from work Monday fully intending to be useful and productive the whole evening long. It's the first day of our Christmas vacation from court-reporting school, and so it's the first Monday evening I've been home in months.

I thought I'd cook a real dinner, do the Christmas cards, read a little bit, go to bed early.

Then I get a call from daughter No. 2, panicked and crying. She had been rear-ended at a red light in Oregon City, and she needed me to come and get her. So I turned off the burners on the stove and swung into action. Her back and neck hurt, and so we needed to go to the emergency room and have it checked out.

Four hours later the problem has been determined to be whiplash, and daughter No. 1 and grandson No. 1 are determined to be uninjured, and we're driving through McDonald's on the way home.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to be of service, and I'm glad that everyone is well, and all that. But these events tempt me just to sit back wait for the next crisis, rather than attempt to do anything that will take thought and effort and concentration.

I've heard the old saying, "Life is what happens when you're making other plans," and I believe it, but if everyone put all their emphasis on that definition of "life," nobody would ever accomplish anything extraordinary. "Balance," of course -- as so often -- is the answer, which is a quick and easy way of saying, "negotiating hard decisions and coming up with unsatisfactory answers." Welcome to life, Jan.

And the folks who are waiting for our Christmas cards will probably get them in time for Old Calendar Christmas -- sooner if I drop the annual Christmas letter; later if not.

Schultze Gets the Blues

2006-12-17T20:14:00.000-08:00

It's a little late for a relevant review, but I just watched the 2003 German movie Schultze Gets the Blues. If you're in the mood for a fast-paced action-adventure thriller, it's probably not the best time to watch it. But if you loved the slower-paced, blossoming (in the sense of layers unfolding and revealing themselves) movies, this is a good one.

I've told my friends that it's The Straight Story meets Babette's Feast.

Schultze is a German salt miner, forced into retirement and casting about for what to do with his life, who hears Louisiana zydeco music on the radio late one night. He pulls out his accordion and imitates the song, taking the simple folk melody he heard and playing it faster and faster until he's got the tempo but not quite the feel of what he heard. He shares the sound with his friends at a local concert with mixed results.

He sells everything he has and goes on a voyage, on a quest, for the music, taking a boat through the coastal waterways, canals, and bayous from Texas to Louisiana.

SPOILER ALERT: If you want to go rent the movie and come back, I'll wait. Take your time.

All right. Back now? Good.

So his quest takes him from German music in Texas, to Billy Jones and the Czech Boys to classic Cajun music to the zydeco he seeks. In fact, he ends up at a joint where he has an opportunity to dance to the same music he heard on the radio.

He has adventures and misunderstandings along the way -- I laughed out loud when the hunters landed a duck in his boat -- and the black woman at his last stop gives him water, a meal and the kindest of hospitality. We don't see her go through the process of figuring out about the music he was looking for; we only see him dancing at the joint. And then he goes short of breath and they take him home. He goes to sleep under a bright full moon, dreaming about Cajuns dancing to music he can't hear. And then a black cloud goes across the moon.

The next scene opens with a musical funeral procession moving through a graveyard. I had been wanting Schultze to triumph, to learn to play the music and to go home and share it with the people there. So I'm watching the procession, thinking, "Did he die? Can't be. Maybe he's visiting a Cajun funeral." And the procession takes its slow cinematic time arriving, so that the viewer can consider all the possibilities.

But the musicians in the procession are the people from Schultze's home town, and they've gathered with their accordions and brass instruments to give him a good sendoff -- something like a Cajun funeral.

So he has triumphed, and he has, in some small way, transformed his community.

Like the painter in Tolkein's Leaf by Niggle, Schultze has had a glimpse of the beauty of another world (in this case, a continent away), a beauty he can only barely capture and not replicate. He goes on a journey to acquire that beauty, and it's a journey that takes his entire life to comprehend. And yet, even in his seeming failure, his all is enough.

The end begins

2006-11-10T16:50:00.000-08:00

I've got no blame, finger-pointing or recriminations. I think I'm going to continue what has become a step aside from politics, while I get other things done.

But the shadows lengthen at the end of what James Lileks called "the greatest summer ever" (it was in a bleat last August or September -- you'll just have to trust me -- but it was exactly the right mix of Minnesota fall and decline of Western civilization that captured the melancholy loveliness of the moment). Now it's November, and the likely chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has connections with militant Islamists. Sen. John Conyers, D-Mich., is from the heavily Islamic area of Dearborn, Mich., where a noise variance allows the Muslim prayer call to be amplified five times every day of the year.

But the bells-vs.-loudspeakers debate will seem quaint if he succeeds with his vow to make it illegal to consider religion and national origin in airport screening, if he and soon-to-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi succeed in their announced plan of gutting the Patriot Act, and if he keeps his vow of drawing up show trials to keep the Commander in Chief from operating the war.

November has its own beauty, though -- of a gray and austere kind. To the people who will die because of the inattentiveness and fecklessness of me and my fellow countrymen, I say I'm sorry. The light was already far slanting when we woke and began to stir, and maybe it was already too late. Or maybe there's time yet. It's always to hard to know, standing on the cusp of what was and what will be.

Montreal Shooter's Website?

2006-09-14T00:18:00.000-07:00

It could be a coincidence, of course: 25-year-old Kimveer Gill of a suburb north of Montreal opens fire on college students in Montreal, killing several and wounding at least 12.

Police killed the shooter at the scene.

Spokespeople kept saying it wasn't a terrorist or racist killing, but I was skeptical, because it's never a terrorist or racist killing, even when the killer says it is, so I googled "Kimveer." Up pops "Fatality666" at VampireFreaks.com, a 25-year-old male from Quebec, Canada, whose profile reads:

His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death . He is male. He is 25 years of age. He lives in Quebec. He finds that it is an O.K place to live. He is not a people person. He has met a handfull of people in his life who are decent. But he finds the vast majority to be worthless, no good, kniving, betraying, lieing, deceptive, motherfuckers.

So it looks like this one is not a terrorist or racist killing. Instead it's a hard-drinking, bored, angry, depressed, Marilyn Manson-fan, Goth-Satanist killing. So 20th century.

It's good to be wrong, but not much comfort for the dead or those who loved them. The dead, so far, are Anastasia DeSousa, 18, and a 20-year-old whose name hasn't been released. (I don't want to speak his name without theirs, because it raises him above them in importance.)

The Truth about Snapping Turtles

2006-09-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

Controversy erupted on a recent comments page, as Fr. Joseph reported that in North Carolina he was told that snapping turtles hold on until the next thunderstorm, whereas I was told in Louisiana that they would hold on until sundown.

Amazon.com Widgets

This is a matter of no small importance, especially since they inhabit streams and lakes east of the Rockies from southern Canada to Ecuador, not to mention reptile collections of people who think of cold-blooded animals as pets.

A woman in Manhattan, wearing sandals, was ruthlessly attacked by an ungrateful snapping turtle that she tried to rescue from a garbage can in Hell's Kitchen.

A criminal in Balch Springs, Texas, tried to use a snapping turtle to commit an armed robbery. He was later charged with assault with a reptile (I kid you not).

The snapping turtle has even played a part in American political history, as this early cartoon compares Pres. Jefferson's embargo to an "Ograbme" turtle. (Is that funny? I guess you had to be there.)

So, given all this danger, of being mugged, attacked on a city street, traumatized in your friend's kitchen, or assaulted by a presidential administration, you're probably wondering, when do they let go -- sundown or thunderstorm? Thunderstorm or sundown? Or does the Heisenberg principle apply, under which they both hold on and let go -- until you shove something in their nostrils.

That's the answer, friends, and a much more satisfactory answer than either the sundown (which could be a long way off) or a thunderstorm (which in Oregon practically never happens).

So now you can say you learned something new today. Or if you already knew all this stuff, you can say I learned something new today.

Stop Editing

2006-09-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

Life lessons can come from surprising places.

Over the weekend, I was looking on the web for magic formulas to help me progress faster in my court reporting course. Actually, I ran across this article in some practice material, and it offered one of those lovely categorizations: If you can fix these problems, you will be assured of success. (Tell me, Doctor, what is wrong with me that I keep going into pursuits where success is an ever-receding horizon?)

Anyway, the article helpfully informs us that there are four classifications of problems: clarity, hesitation, carrying and editing. If you're overly persnickety, as I am, you will note that they overlap and and feed each other, but when I read the description of "editing," I realized I was nailed:

4) Writers who edit while writing:

A. This is the strangest group of all (I rest my case). This group looks backward to check the accuracy of previous strokes. This is not conducive to learning. It must be stopped.

This is the same reason that I'm writing my novel by hand (700 words today, by the way), because when I sit at a keyboard, I can't leave the prior paragraphs alone. It's not right; it's not colorful; it's got typos; it's stupid; it's boring. Anne Lamott's slogan, "I'll fix it later," doesn't work, because it's too easy to read the type above and see the errors and problems and fear that they won't get fixed before going public (and looking at yesterday's post, I see that that is a definite danger--and I won't fix it later). Handwriting is enough harder to read, and I know I have to type it anyway, so I can say, "I'll fix it later," and trust myself to do it.

And it's possible to live like that, too, second-guessing every decision, every move, until someone's afraid to do anything because it might be wrong, stupid, boring, not clever, etc.

It's not that editing shouldn't happen, but if it begins too soon -- whether in court reporting, writing or life -- it ties up the person so that forward motion is impossible. Martin Luther was getting near this idea in his oft-quoted "Be a sinner and sin boldly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ."

And the day job I'm trying to work myself out of? Editing. No wonder it makes me crazy.

When I'm Not Blogging

2006-09-10T22:16:00.000-07:00

Despite good intentions and not-as-good efforts, blogging has fallen off over the past couple of months. I'm pleased to report that there's a good reason.

I've gotten to the text phase of my novel.

It's been longer in production than I care to admit. I started writing it in the 1980s. It was going to be "Left Behind" before there was a market for "Left Behind."

Then I read The Gulag Archipelago (the whole thing--I was riding the bus to and from work every day and had lots of time), and the idea that American Evangelical Christians would get a free pass on persecution seemed empty. But I still had these characters and their experience seemed to have the capacity to go deeper, and so it changed and changed and changed, and I "finished" it. That was in the mid-90s, I think.

So I tried to market it. I got some "good" rejections (if you don't write, you probably don't know that there are levels of rejections, sort of like Dante's hell, but I'll spare you the misery; if you do write, you know the wailing and gnashing of teeth). But in the process of leaving no stone unturned, no agent unqueried, I collected 250 rejections (another embarrassing admission). But I wouldn't trade that binder of rejections for what I learned from the process: At some point they stopped being demoralizing; at 125, they started being funny. Did you know that some literary agents subscribe to a rejection service, the way some preachers subscribe to a sermon service? I made that up, but it sounds like it. You know you've gone around the bend when you're holding up your own query letter to the light to find out if the "Not for us" scrawled in the upper-right-hand corner is actual writing or a stamp.

The comedy lost its luster, and I desk-drawered the novel around 1999. In 2002, I pulled it out, queried it again (I don't recall why) and got at least one publisher writing back and telling me that if I had pitched it to them a year ago, they might have taken it. I thought about revising, but I didn't know how.

Disaster struck around 2003. An unbacked-up hard disk crash destroyed drafts 7-9 of the novel. After an appropriate time of wailing and gnashing of teeth (see above, multiply by 9), I decided to start again from scratch. I've read Robert McKee; I've taken excellent workshops from Larry Brooks, Candy Davis and recently Marc Acito. I've worked on plot structure, story arc, writing the novel from the bones outward. Each time I thought I had drawn near to actually writing text, I've learned something new that I wanted to incorporate into the entire draft. Sometime in August, I finished with the structure. I knew I was finished, even though I hadn't finalized the last chapter, because I felt that if I did one more thing, I'd be done, too done to finish it.

So I printed up the outline, put it into a three-ring notebook and haven't looked at it since. If I get lost in the swamp, I've got the map, but now I'm following the road where it leads. It's gritty and surprising, and I may have departed from the map already, but it's rolling along, and I keep reminding myself that I can fix it later.

And I'm writing it by hand, in those wonderful Mead composition books with the stitched binding and the wide-ruled sheets. The goal is to put down the pen and not lift it. To keep reminding myself that I can fix it later. To wander where my characters take me. Page by page it goes, about 100-150 words per page, 200 pages per book, five notebooks ready for the draft.

I hoped to get it done by next summer. I don't know if I'll be able to do it. If I get in 500 words per day, I should be able to do my 90,000-word first draft in about six months.

So if I'm not here, that's one of the places I am. I'm off to get my 500 words in for tonight.

A Shameless Paschal Promotion

2006-09-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

What it lacks in theological nuance it makes up in . . . pink.

H/T: Marie.

My Name, Too!

2006-09-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

I went to the schoolyard to interview a teacher for a story. When I was done, I called to a few of the little girls playing nearby to have their picture taken with the teacher. I got three of them, about third grade, and they stood smiling in a cluster around Mr. G. They called to their friend to join them in the picture. She thought about it, but decided against it.

After I had snapped the photo, I stopped the girls in place to write down their names, and first in line suddenly was the girl who didn't want to be in the photo.

Some people are visual, and some are literary.

Dying for Christ vs. Showing What's Real

2006-09-08T01:22:00.000-07:00

Christians are getting down to the discussion of the two reporters who decided to "convert" to Islam at the point of a gun.

Grace asks pertinently:

I’m not saying that the martyr’s crown is for everyone. If it was, there would be nothing exceptional about martyrs. But here we are, nearly 100 years later, and the radical Muslims are still fighting a religious war. Have they not noticed how much the Western world has changed? Do they know how many prisoners they would have to go through to find one that wouldn’t deny Christ to save his or her life?

Will they find any?

And GetReligion points out the double standard:

Try to picture an army of Ann Coulters — in black leather skirts, perhaps — forcing a pair of defenseless Muslims to convert, with swords at their throats and video cameras aimed at their faces. That would not happen, of course. At worse, Coulter would force them to listen to her do dramatic readings from her upcoming greatest hits collection. But you get the point. At Georgetown University, if would almost certainly be a thought crime to ask two Muslims to get a cup of coffee and discuss the Trinity.

And Rod Dreher agrees with David Warren that the freed reporters ought at least to have the decency to be ashamed of their cravenness.

And I don't dispute any of their points. But one of the commenters on Dreher's blog gets at the essential confusion about what it means to "die for Christ":

I would choose life. I would choose to carry my faith in my heart and lie through my teeth to survive the experience, because no matter what you say about faith, it dies when the body and mind dies, and there is little to depend on beyond that very faith for what comes after death.

But it's really not about "dying for Christ," so much as it's about not letting a little thing like death make someone lie about who he is or what's real. Or, more accurately, it's that death clarifies and reveals the essential reality at the base of who we are.

It's no benefit to Christ that people die, whether for Him or for Western civilization. The Christian martyr is not the master of his own death -- which is exactly the point.

The "witness" of the martyr is not that death is nothing, but that it's the final spotlight on who we are and what we care about. It's the Misfit saying, "She could have been a good woman if she had someone to kill her every minute" (quoted from memory, so not guaranteed for accuracy). It's St. Polycarp replying to the same offer the reporters had: "I have served Christ for six and eighty years, and never has he done me evil. How, then, can I blaspheme my King and Savior?"

Obviously, reporters Centanni and Wiig have not served Christ for 86 years (even together, they probably haven't lived that long), and when the bright light shone on their values, they revealed what they believed. They seem satisfied with what they found.

Like Dreher, Warren, Mattingly and Grace, I would be horrified and humiliated to discover that my reality was so small. I would come back, not bragging about it, but repenting of its paucity and working to enlarge it. In fact, as I type this post, I worry that my reality doesn't measure up to that of an 86-year-old (or older) man's (though my assumption that reality shrinks as we age is perhaps evidence of my own immaturity).

We all get that light shined on us sooner or later, though for most the decision isn't televised. I think I'm glad. It raises the concept of Survivor to a whole new level.

Same old playbook

2006-08-22T22:31:00.000-07:00

Stella Jatras finds the parallels and the contrasts between the media front in the Hezbollah-Israel war and the one in the Balkans:

It appears that Hezbollah has taken a page out of the Bosnian Muslim playbook: Win the PR battle, and you win the war. What better example of media disinformation than the Bosnian War, where images of civilians 'slaughtered' at Sarajevo's Markale market place, allegedly by Serb forces, were so instrumental? If it worked for the Bosnian Muslims, why not for Hezbollah? Will Qana, Lebanon, become Israel's Markale market place?

If you want to know why we really attacked Serbia, she's got names, dates, places, documentation. And Hezbollah in the Balkans.

Blog blunder fells UA teacher

2006-07-12T06:58:00.000-07:00

My schedule has become too intense to follow a lot of the big blog controversies, and this one has been going on so long that even a print newspaper takes notice. But if you want to see why people don't trust the daily papers, take a look at the story and then the first comment which gives the "rest of the story."

But that's not what this post is about. It's about a sidebar on the newspaper page, titled "Blogging Etiquette: How to Blog Safely."

Now remember, this is a sidebar to a story in which a college instructor loses her job because she made repeated death threats against a blogger's two-year-old. So here are the rules of blogging etiquette:

Blog anonymously. Preserve some privacy by shielding your IP address and registering your domain name anonymously.

Use a pseudonym and don't give away any identifying details, including where you're located, how many employees there are and what sort of business you do.

Do not blog while you're at work.

Limit your audience by only allowing a select group of people to read your blog.

Do you notice anything left out from that list? I'll give you a hint; how about "Don't say anything on the Internet that you wouldn't say to a person's face in the middle of a room full of people"? Then you wouldn't need to hide your IP address and comment anonymously.

In fact the first two rules are, generally speaking, made for people like Deb Frisch, who (presumably) can't take their (apparent) anger issues out in their everyday life. The third one is probably good employment advice, and the fourth runs counter to what most bloggers are trying to accomplish.

And given the "rules," the title "Blogging Etiquette: How to Blog Safely" is an oxymoron. Because the rules don't have to do with etiquette (manners, politeness, civility), but with how to get away with being a complete jerk.

So let me reiterate the one rule that should have been there but wasn't, that would have saved Frisch's job if she had followed it: The Internet is public. Don't say anything there that you wouldn't want published.

A note to grocery clerks

2006-07-09T19:25:00.000-07:00

Dear nice young lady who rang up my groceries this evening:

I suspect that your boss told you he wanted you to be "friendly," to "engage me in conversation" so that I would feel like I'm at a "hometown" grocery store, despite the fact that I shop here about three times a year because it's outside my neighborhood and despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of square feet of merchandise space and dozens of employees I've never seen before and possibly never will see again.

When I think of a "friendly" store, I think of a place where they do their jobs without acting as though I'm wasting their time, where they take my word for it if I come back the next day and report that my milk was sour, where, if I want to start a conversation, they go along with it, but not to the extent that they hold up the other customers behind me in line.

I don't really feel that it's "friendly" when I undergo a third-degree about the groceries I bought, what I plan to eat for dinner or how I plan to cook it. I also don't care very much if you approve my choice of grocery products or if you congratulate me on my money-saving shopping style.

In fact, I actually have enough of a life that you don't have to provide my sense of community or neighborhood.

I'll be nice to you and give one-word answers to your questions, just in care your manager is watching, but now you know that I know that it's a meaningless ruse. My question for you: Do you know it's a meaningless ruse?

Oh, by the way

2006-07-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

There a new Onion Dome posted.

I'd give it an "ehh"

2006-07-08T11:40:00.000-07:00

We went to see Superman last evening. We started on a lark to see the new pirate movie, but once at the theatre, we realized that only the hardcore would be seeing the pirate movie last night.

So we and about five others watched Superman.

I'd been hearing all the hype leading up to it: Is Superman a Christ figure? or an Anti-Christ figure? Tales of English churchmen teaching their little Sunday school charges about the Bible through the Superman movie (I suspect their Sunday school charges are about as scarce as the moviegoers last night, but good luck to them.) You could see "Christ-image" dotting the film like refrigerator magnets -- but they never got to the essence of the story, and it was never quite clear what the essence of the story was, exactly.

What I loved about the old Superman movies with Christopher Reeve, may he rest in peace, was the sense of the romp, the big-screen comic book. This one seemed to be going for the big-screen TV show, down to including the TV theme as a motif in the opening music and Perry White's intonation on "Great Caesar's ghost!"

That would offer one possible explanation of why Superman/Clark Kent was so wooden. Brandon Routh is an appealing kid, but the Christopher Reeve legacy seemed to weigh heavy upon him. He seemed to be playing Christopher Reeve as Superman. And at times I'm not sure it actually was Brandon Routh. Some of the flight scenes looked like they had been staged by Pixar, and a CGI Brandon Routh was doing the flying. (And what's with that curl in the middle of Superman's forehead? It never moved in the wind.)

But there was a constant weight of ponderousness, as if the writers wanted us to be -- what? -- enlightened? There was no substance, just the voice of Marlon Brando uttering vaguely Biblish platitudes about human potential. We deserved Superman because we were so -- could be so -- good. Well, whatever. I liked the fact that people, with their inadequate medical facilities, did what they could to help Superman, and if they had wanted to wrap something profound in a Superman story, it might have been something more along the lines of "even Superman needs help sometimes" -- which, come to think of it, was a theme of the old Superman III.

Up next: Ingmar Bergman directs the next installment -- Three Scenes from Superman Eating Wild Strawberries.

Looking for love in all the wrong places

2006-06-08T00:07:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a young friend recently and found myself saying about a certain kind of sinful behavior -- "What they want is real and good, and I believe there's a real need at its core, but the way they're going about it is out of harmony with the cosmos."

The reason the sentence struck me is that it's not the first time I've said that to her, and the prior time had to do with a different sinful behavior. Am I, I wondered, a stuck record blandly repeating an all-purpose platitude, or do I really believe that many -- if not most -- of the sins people commit are broken and counterproductive attempts to acquire a real good in their lives.

I suppose, if sin is distributed in a bell curve, as most things are, you would find a few saints at one end, more and more giving themselves to God's way of doing things at the expense of their own. At the other, you would find approximately the same percentage doing things against God's way, again at the expense of their own ("He'd cut off his nose to spite his face" is the way they would summarize that where I grew up).

And in the middle, you find the nice, the comfortable, the go-along-to-get-along, and somewhere on the one downslope or the other of that curve, you would find the "looking for love in all the wrong places."

I don't have anything profound to say about that bell curve. On the one hand, enlightened self-interest can add to social civility. "You treat other people well, and they'll treat you well," is not the Golden Rule, but if it's practiced, there's less chaos than if it's not.

On the other hand, in the Gospels, Christ always seems to show a special love for the "looking for love in all the wrong places" folks. As in the case of the Samaritan Woman, he pointed out the dead ends where they were searching for what they needed and where to find what would be real and deep and lasting. He was also quite impatient with those who were pleased and comfortable with themselves for following the rules (which may be another example of looking for love in all the wrong places), even over against the ones who participated in making the chaos (for example, the Publican and the Pharisee).

I've never quite gotten my mind wrapped around the notion that in Orthodoxy, sin is not transgressing a law but "missing the mark." But that's the key to it, isn't it? "Looking for love in all the wrong places." Looking for release from pain in addiction, looking for affirmation in illicit love affairs, looking for spiritual reality in fortune-telling and spiritualism, looking for recognition and respect in power games. In all those cases -- and more, more, more -- there is something real and important and needful at the core of it, but those pursuits can't fill the need and instead make the need harder to fill and bring their own next level of chaos, disharmony, anti-cosmos, in a downward spiral.

Or that downward spiral can make plain how false and hopeless is the attempt to fill the need outside God's providence. Hitting bottom (the sooner the better) is the place of spiritual poverty at which we receive the Kingdom of Heaven. Knowing to give up the ineffective treatments of both the woman caught in adultery and her captors can bring us to that place of emptiness where God can fill us.

And of course in true Christ-like fashion, He turns the whole bell curve inside out and upside down. Even as we pray several times a day for "calm and ordered lives," He proclaims disgust for the comfortable, the go-along-to-get-along, the lukewarm and states a preference for the hot or the cold. It's a paradox, not a contradiction, but it leaves us, once again, on the high wire with nothing to depend on but God's own guidance. And that tiny umbrella that the wire-walkers carry.

And the last shall be first, and the first last.

Creepy Dr. Kildare

2006-06-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

I used to watch the Dr. Kildare television show back in the '60s when heartthrob Richard Chamberlain used all the latest technology to save (or not) the winsome patients who came his way.

This 1940s radio episode has the same basic plot, but hindsight has the amazing power to turn melodrama to horror.

It seems that an old friend of Dr. Kildare's, a talented pianist, has become increasingly erratic. She can't play in public, although her father wanted her to be a concert pianist (think Shine without the upbeat ending). But she's also exhibiting signs of paranoid schizophrenia -- thinking her hands are locked into playing a certain piece, and that her husband is trying to kill her when he's not.

Young Dr. Kildare diagnoses her problem as obsessive-compulsive disorder with paranoid delusions and prescribes a prefrontal lobotomy.

And so this young doctor, who apparently isn't necessarily a specialist in anything, much less in brain surgery (or every episode would be about a lobotomy) does the surgery. The sound of the power saw only goes for about a half second, which was merciful.

Three days later her husband goes for a visit, and she's just fine. A couple of weeks later, she throws a big party and sits down to play a little Chopin for everybody and announces that her hands are free.

What a long way from Dr. Kildare to Nurse Ratched.

New Onion Dome up

2006-06-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

We're not as regular as we used to be, so to the handful of people who still check out new posts on this blog (thanks for that, I mean it), there's a new issue of the Onion Dome for June, featuring a classic tribute to Prof. Penguin, an Orthodox protest about the Da Vinci code and Duwamish County Orthodox favorites.

Why Justin loves the New York Times

2006-06-02T20:13:00.000-07:00

I've been hanging out with a different group of people lately. Frequently imaginary.

When I was a kid, I had imaginary friends. My mom and her fellow parents discussed it and interpreted it as loneliness, because I was an only child. Little did they know that even when I was much older and not at all lonely, a fictional person would wake me up at 5 in the morning to tell me why he loved the New York Times.

His name is Justin Lieberman, and I've told his story nine times now without getting it quite right, but this time, it's the definitive tale. Right or wrong, as good as Seth or as lame as Brown, whether I sell it or podcast it, it will be finished.

That's still down the road a bit. I'm working on my treatment, from which I'll write my draft, and I'll give updates. But for now I'll tell you what Justin told me, which he may or may not tell anybody else in the course of his story. But since he's fictional and in the dystopian future, he won't have a chance to read this blog, so I'll tell you.

It was the New York Times. If I couldn’t be part of the Times, I couldn’t imagine being anything else.

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor in my parents’ apartment with the Times spread out all around me, the smell and texture of the ink gradually modifying the chemistry of my brain. I couldn’t even read yet, but I stared at the pictures until they resolved into dots and back to pictures again. I looked at the stories until they resolved into letters and back into stories again. My parents carried on happy and rancorous debates about subjects I couldn't understand, pointed at the graphics to back up their arguments, all the while hinting to me, whom they had forgotten sitting in the midst of their cast-off sections, that there was knowledge, mystery, power of information, community, a shared world, in those pages, if I only knew how to interpret them.

I was still a kid when the scandals hit -- the plagiarism, the cooked stories, the revoked Pulitzers. I was angry, and my friends looked at me as if I had lost my grip on reality, but the scandals couldn’t break the spell. By then I was reading, and the world my parents had pointed to had opened out to me -- the ponderous editorials, fashion glitz, emaciated models, a ream of book reviews every Sunday. Even more, there was a vast army of reporters going out into all the world to find out what was happening and what it all meant, and even then, even then, I knew I wanted to be one of them. The Times was the paper its enemies cited to prove they had done their homework. It arrived with the morning coffee of every head of state on the planet.

In middle school, I would cut class and take the subway to the Times Building to watch the shifts change. It seemed to me that if you were a reporter for the Times your footprints must glow on the pavement under ultraviolet light.

I didn’t give it up. It was pulled from my cold, dead fingers.

Go, Ducks

2006-05-31T20:08:00.000-07:00

Medford girl waddles with pet duck

So what I want to know is why she didn't get offered a scholarship to the University of Oregon.

Just asking.

What is privacy?

2006-05-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

NSA wiretaps and data mining, nanochips in cans of green beans, two-way GPS locators and cell phone tracking -- it's all a violation of privacy and that's a Bad Thing, right?

Right?

Well, what is privacy anyway? What's it for, and how do you know if you have it?

The "right to privacy" was invented, I believe, in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court found it lurking in the moonshadows of the Bill of Rights. Women were guaranteed the right to walk in broad daylight into Feminist Women's Child Extraction Centers to preserve this "right to privacy." Oooooookay.

But of course the "right to privacy" goes back much further into American history. In his novel The Road to Ruin, Donald Westlake comments on the grand American tradition of "lighting out to the territories" when things got too hot at home. "Hot" as in "the sheriff's on my tail." Well, as Westlake's character -- who has just participated in a kidnaping -- points out, there aren't any territories anymore, and if there were (my observation now, not Westlake's), we'd want the sheriff to be able to find us so that he can send a search-and-rescue team if we get lost in a snowdrift.

I like privacy, too. If someone asks me an impertinent question, I like to be able to refuse to answer it. I appreciate laws that keep unfriendly observers out of my medical and financial records. And I wouldn't participate in a Big Brother TV show, where everything that happens in the house is viewed and commented upon.

So that's my definition of privacy -- to keep as much of my inner life as I choose, to have control to access to medical and financial matters, and to have personal alone space.

So I have a hard time getting exercised about a gadget that tells the company that owns the truck I'm renting that I've endangered its property by driving too fast on the highway. No one cares about my telephone calls to my friend. And blogs and e-mails -- they're public, get used to it.

Consumer Reports got excited about nanochips in products. It seems that if you buy a can with a nanochip instead of a bar code, everybody you drive past, if they have the correct scanner, will be able to tell you have a can of green beans in your car. (I remember when bar codes were the Mark of the Beast.)

Once upon a time, when everyone lived in small towns, everybody knew you bought green beans, too, and the neighbors could listen in on your phone calls, and everybody knew who everybody hung out with. It's the same information, but those days carry the golden light of nostalgia, and nobody now seems to be asking the essential question: Who cares?

The Seattle Times shows how difficult it is to get to an answer to that question:

Some labor unions and privacy experts have objected to the Big Brother implications of location tracking.

"One might think it does not matter if their employer knows that he goes to Starbucks every morning before work or that they spend Sundays at his girlfriend's house," the National Workforce Institute, a nonprofit training organization in Austin, Texas, said in a recent policy paper.

"If someone has the ability to know the real-time location of a person around the clock," the statement said, "they learn everything about that person, much of which is highly personal and private in nature."

Proving that if one asks a question of some people, they will give you an answer that is highly circular in nature. It's an invasion of privacy because it's an invasion of privacy.

However, some union members are also checking to see whether their fellow employees are wearing union-made uniforms. Car manufacturers make their employees park their foreign cars in off-company lots. This is about not privacy but control, and the answer to it is not to hide out under the same umbrella that protects thieves and murderers, but to stand up to the micromanagement.

What ever happened to courage?

About "disrespect" and literature

2006-05-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

When I told someone recently that I "hated" The Da Vinci Code, I had to clarify that I don't disrespect people who like it. I don't understand why people take their literary taste so seriously.

A couple of years ago, I went to a presentation on poetic language, and the speaker went out for coffee with a few of us later. I recognized Owen Barfield as an influence in his viewpoint, and we talked a little about that, then turned to Charles Williams, whom he didn't like. I said, "Well, as far as that goes, I don't like Walt Whitman either."

The people around the table said, "Ooooo," as if we were on a school ground and I'd just kicked dirt into his eyes.

I must be culturally tone deaf, but I was taken aback by the response. All I meant was something along the lines of, "It takes all kinds," and everybody else at the table took it as, "You don't like my writer, well, I don't like yours. So there!"

The truth is, I don't think Charles Williams is "great literature," though I have my reasons for enjoying him. And I do think Whitman is "great literature," though I have my reasons for not enjoying him. Why should that cause a problem for Whitman fans? When I say, "I don't like sushi," sushi fans say something like, "Not fond of raw fish, eh?"

I would phrase the thing differently -- or keep my mouth shut -- if I were talking to Whitman himself, but even there -- isn't it just a matter of reality that some people won't like our work? What is it to the author of hard space opera if Frannie Romannie says she doesn't like it?

This is an honest question, if anyone cares to speculate about the answer with me. I think it has something to do with how we view ourselves, and how we think our literary tastes mark us. But is that a valid perception? Am I really going to think less of my friend because she doesn't like Notes from Underground and I do? Or is our discussion of what we like and dislike about the book more likely to open aspects of the work we hadn't seen? As in the case of Frannie Romannie, the parts of the hard space opera she didn't like may be the parts that her friend Jeremy Rocketer likes the best. And the parts she manages to appreciate about it could help him to see aspects of the story he hadn't seen before. Or whatever.

Or is there some hierarchy of "right" vs. "wrong" literature, which one violates at one's peril? (And how come I never get those memos?)

Stephen King's Cell

2006-03-31T22:22:00.000-08:00

Stephen King's new thriller, Cell, reminds me of how compelling King can be, in a way that leaves me feeling manipulated and used. He shows a deep-rooted "damned mass" view of human nature, even while he displays authorial hate for characters within the story who share a view that's perhaps not as extreme as his. And in an effort to raise his book from a beach read to something Socially Significant, he ends up spouting tin-hat political slogans that will be pathetically out of date after the 2008 elections (by which time, of course, he'll have earned more royalties on this book than I will in my entire life, just in case anyone thinks I don't know the "If you're so smart, how come you're not published" response).

My view of King's writings has swung between disdain at the goriness of it and at his gimmick of taking the friendly and familiar -- a car, a dog, a cat, a rambling lodge in the mountains -- and making something horrifying out of it -- and respect for real talents of storytelling and observation of human nature. His coming of age novel, The Body, surprised and delighted me with its look at the relationships among a group of schoolboys, and the 12-year-old storyteller character gave me a grounding in the adult author's boyish reveling in the "Oh gross!" After running across The Body, I counted myself a fan.

Cell brings me back to my weariness with the Kinginess of King. He goes back to his attacks on the familiar with the cell phone trick -- cell phones are ubiquitous, and a lot of people love them, and a vocal minority hate them, and King with his $80 kajillion in the bank proudly notes on the cover copy that he doesn't own one, thus showing how morally superior he is. (I know. There are people who are unmannerly about their cell phones. They are also frequently unmannerly about radios, loud conversation and chewing gum. Will King go after these menace also? Justin wondering.)

Even though I couldn't put the book down, at the end, I felt that I had -- in a literary sense -- wasted my time and attention. All the same, for a writer, there's much here to learn.

A certain element of the "page-turner" quality is important in a book. If a reader isn't curious about what happens next, he may very well put a bookmark in the page and look at the book six months later, thinking, "Maybe I'll get back to it sometime." At the other extreme, if the book is just a page turner, when I'm done, I feel as if I've just gone through a chocolate frenzy -- disoriented, guilty over the loss of time and nauseated.

But how does King pull off the page-turner quality that he does so well? Sharp detail and a lot of foreshadowing. He keeps revealing what will happen later, in terms that leave the outcome open to speculation but that, when fulfilled, leave the reader thinking, "Of course." King also imagines the situation so vividly that the reader never gets around to thinking, "Now just a gol-darned minute . . . ." For instance, what happens to the cell-phone users is that there's some kind of signal sent by satellite that fries their brains. So the hero uses a landline to call long distance. Well, aren't all long-distance calls sent by satellite? And all these people use their cell phones and get their brains wiped, so there's no alternative source of information? And nobody in the book has heard of the Internet. But he papers over these plotholes with breakneck pacing and one dire circumstance after another.

Dire circumstances bring me back to what I used to hate about King, before I became a fan. It's a weird thing about movies and literature that an author can commit all kinds of mayhem against people and readers nod and turn the page. When the villain kills a dog or a cat, readers write angry letters to the publisher. I don't understand it, but I feel it myself, and King shows a man in a business suit, under the influence of the pulse, bite the ear off a dog. King's POV character says he doesn't know anything about dogs, with an intimation that he doesn't care very much, and I wonder if that's the attitude of the author. Reading it, it comes across as "he doesn't stop at anything." Looking back, it seems more like a cheap trick.

The novel I finished before Cell was Notes from Underground. Dostoyevsky is an author who really doesn't turn back from anything. The speaker tells about a conversation with a prostitute, and the outcome of that conversation is as wrenching in its way -- in the destruction of the innocent -- as cruelty to an animal. The difference is that Dostoyevsky is saying something deep and heart-breaking about the state of a man's soul. With Cell, King is exposing readers to the torture of a dog just for effect.

Or maybe for King, it's slightly more than an effect. His characters later arrive at the conclusion that the cell wiped out people's minds, leaving the murder that lies at the base of the human mind (soul?). Well, I've heard that King was an Evangelical Christian (still don't know whether to believe it), but this would suggest that he's at least a one-point (total depravity) Calvinist. He expresses characters' hatred and author's hatred (by his one-sided, all ugly, bad, and unfashionable description) for a pushy end-times fundy creep -- whose kind apparently demonstrated at abortion clinics in one character's past -- but he never deals with the similarity between said creep, who assumes that the two men have taken the girl for immoral purposes, and the author's apparent view that if you strip away our self-knowledge and socialization, there's nothing left but the savagery of a rabid animal.

I tell myself it's a beach read, and I'm asking too much to expect him to deal with any bedrock issues. But if that's the case, why the political frippery? What does it add to the story to make a snarky comment about Bush's "inadequate plan" in Iraq (whether any given reader favors the war or not)? If I were reading a beach book from 1944, would it add to the effect or take away from it that the writer thinks Roosevelt's plan for the Pacific Theatre was crazy? Or from 1965 and Johnson's plan for Vietnam? Again, it's a pose of relevance that has nothing to do with the story and everything to do with an illusion that something Important is happening here.

If you're a writer, it's worth a read for King's techniques of detail and foreshadowing. If you're a reader, a Batman comic would be a more profound investment of time.

How Will Borders Celebrate Banned Books Week This Year?

2006-03-31T07:41:00.000-08:00

After years of "edginess" and "speaking truth to power," Borders Bookstores (and its little brother Waldenbooks) has rolled over before the Islamist fringe.

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.

And why is that?

"For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority," Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.

But wait. I thought Islam was a religion of peace. Is Borders saying that selling a magazine with the Danish cartoons could put customers in danger? From whom? Fundamentalist Christians?

Combine that with what seems to be a consensus if not a policy among stores in the chain: Borders has begun putting the Koran on top shelves -- "out of respect for the religion." Is this the same religion a chain spokeswoman has just accused of being out-of-control lunatics who have gone nuts over some cartoons? Upper-shelf Koran placement doesn't offend me, though. It's the stuff at eye level that sells.

But I think I'll be shopping Powell's or Barnes and Noble in the future.

H/T: My friend Susan, who doesn't have a blog but ought to.

Dangers of Political Correctness

2006-03-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

J.R. Dunn, at American Thinker says that political correctness runs the risk of poisoning relations between moderate Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States and elsewhere.

He points to three recent, egregious instances of political correctness run riot -- Umar Abdul-Jalil, the New York prison chaplain, fired for making anti-Semitic comments and then reinstated; Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, the North Carolina SUV jihadist whose terroristic comments don't seem to merit anyone's notice; and of course Sayed Rahmatullah Hasemi, the Taliban jock at Yale.

Political correctness doesn't do anything for ordinary Muslims -- only raises people like those and groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations to the status of "ordinary Muslims," leaving the rest of us to say, "If that's normal, then these people are scary."

We have to keep turning away from the politically correct crowd, with their blinkers of denial, and acknowledge that some Muslims are our enemies so that we can see the ones who are friends of humanity. Dunn lists several -- "the Trainer," who brought down a terrorist group; Wafa Sultan, a psychologist and a woman, who argued an imam into a sputtering fit on Al-Jazeera; columnist Amir Taheri, and others I hadn't heard of (which backs up his point). He omitted the Saudi ex-pat blogger, the Religious Policeman, who is able to laugh at Muslim foibles -- and be outraged at cruelties passing for Muslim piety -- without denying his faith.

The elites pushing political correctness -- by their arrogant and elitist view that the mere mortals below them can't handle the truth -- make the danger larger in both perception and reality than if they dealt in truth and distinction.

Dunn finishes with a good point:

We have matured since WW II and the disgrace of the Nisei relocation. We are in some ways a better people than we were.

That may well have surprised our enemies – who can say that Osama bin Laden wasn’t counting on a domestic anti-Muslim backlash to turn the Islamic world further against the United States? A schism between American Muslims and the rest of the citizenry would be an answered prayer for Al-Queda. That’s something worth keeping in mind.

Fun find of the day

2006-03-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

The George Mason University Speech Accent Archive.

Native and non-native English speakers from around the world read a short paragraph, giving a flavor of what makes their pronunciation different.

Europe, the wolf is not just at the door

2006-03-07T13:43:00.000-08:00

He's on the dining room table eating your dinner and growling at you.

This symposium in Front Page Magazine explains what the cartoon fracas was really all about, in the context of increasing incidents of gang rape of non-veiled women:

The conduct towards these women is due to the new developments initiated by Salafists like Tariq Ramadan. He has invented and introduced a new definition for the Western countries: they should no longer be seen the traditional way as Dar ul-harb, the space of war, but as Dar el-dawaà, the invitation to Islam, or Dar ash-shahâda, the space of testimony.

While orthodox Sunni Muslims, stuck to the unchanged application of the tradition are not at all in line with this 'modern' interpretation, the 'scholar' Tariq Ramadan has paved a soft way for Muslims to taking possession of countries formerly belonging to the Dar ul-harb. When living in Dar ul-harb there are two alternatives for the Muslims: either conquer the land by force and rule it by Qur'anic law or, if not strong enough, keep quiet and wait, not touching the property of the enemy.

Dar el-dawaà and Dar ash-shahâda are two of the trickiest inventions ever to reach the goal of conquest: at a quick and superficial glance it means resigning from the conversion of the West to Islam, permitting everybody to keep on in his belief, but on closer examination that means what the French call 'l'entrisme', unnoticed penetration.

By its weakness and willingness to compromise, Europe has revealed itself to be no longer in the "House of War" but in the "House of Almost Muslim." I don't know if there are any alpha dogs left in Europe. It looks to me that anyone who stands up to the wolf there gets murdered, and all the beta dogs look at each other and shrug and say, "There, but for the curvature of my own spine, go I."

Now the wolf looks to tame the alpha bitch (I mean this in the most clinical metaphorical sense, but think about it). It's the independent woman who breaks down the Islamofascist social structure, at least as it's interpreted by the Tariq Ramadans of the world.

I acknowledge that there are Muslims who want to live at peace with their non-Muslim neighbors, but if the secularists and Christians aren't willing to stand up, why should they?

Positives of St. Ephrem

2006-03-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

O Lord and Master of my life,
Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk,
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to your servant.
Yea, Lord and King, grant me to see my own faults and not judge my brother,
For you are blessed unto ages of ages.
Amen.

A while back, I wrote about the negative line of the Prayer of St. Ephrem, and my parish priest challenged me to get to the positives before Lent. I thought it was unlikely, given that I'd taken 15 years to learn the negatives, but I have collected a few thoughts.

Here's the line I'm referring to as the positives: "Give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to your servant." I had expected to find that the positives filled slots left by departing negatives or that there would be some kind of neat parallel between the lines. Instead the reality is much richer and more complicated.

The word "chastity," in the way most people understand it, has come to be entirely sexual, and in the licentious general culture of our time, "chastity" even has a connotation of being unhealthy or ridiculous. But the Greek word is sofrosini, "wholeness."

To be whole is to "have it together," to be complete, integrated -- drawing on the related Latin root, to have integrity. St. Paul told the Corinthians that sexual promiscuity joins a person to various sexual partners, leaving him scattered, and we have a bit of understanding what that means when we say out our attention is scattered -- we're here and there, but not present where we are.

In this moment is the only place my life is happening, and I lose too much of my life by being elsewhere while appearing to be here. In Charles Williams' novel War in Heaven, there's a stone that gives its holder whatever he wishes for. One character thinks he can go into the future and make a killing at the stock market or something, and as a test, he wishes himself a half hour into the future. What really happens is that he moves his decision-making capacity out of the present time and spends the rest of his life reacting to what he's already done -- in this instance having killed a man. Williams' description of the character's vague memories of having done the murder exactly fits my vague memories when I've interacted inattentively.

Chastity is like being a grownup driving a school bus. In the back, feelings and passions, fears and wishes and expectations, nostalgia and regrets vie for the bus driver's attention. They want to stop here or go faster or change direction. There may be a reason to stop, speed up or change direction, but I need to keep my adult decision-making capacity, in harmony with the Holy Spirit, as the driver.

Humility makes its natural and sometimes painful appearance when I realize how often I've let the kids drive the bus. But beyond that, thinking through this line of the prayer, I made a list of the things that tempt me away from sofrosini. It was a short, unscientific survey, but I learned how often the voices in the back of the bus were saying, "I don't want to be [there]," or "I don't want to do [that]," or "I don't have time for [that]." Humility doesn't say, "I deserve better." Humility doesn't say a lot, in fact, except maybe to repeat St. Paul's description of love, "Love suffers long and is kind . . ." (1 Cor. 13:4-8). Humility doesn't keep us from working to improve our situation, but it begins here, in this moment, with the reality at hand.

Patience also follows sofrosini, and, oddly, not so painfully. Without sofrosini, the effort to be patient is a battle of will against hurry, a sort of teeth-gritting, watch-watching, "Will you hurry up?" on the inside and a tight smile on the outside. But when I do have the adult driving the bus, each moment has its own purpose, and having to slow down is a gift to at least one of the kids in the back of the bus -- so I can enjoy that short sense of leisure.

St. Paul's description of love is worth repeating here, because it captures the interplay of the positives in this line: "Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails."

Finally, a few words on the next line of St. Ephrem's prayer: "Grant me to see my own faults and not judge my brother." Seeing one's own faults is an aid to humility, but I've learned something new about judging.

I've always thought that warnings against judging one's neighbor have to do with negative judgments -- and misunderstanding the meaning and effect of "judgment," tended to narrow it to judging someone's eternal disposition. But my search for sofrosini has taught me that even positive or neutral judgments can damage a relationship. I heard a fairly famous author say, "You don't meet people at zero anymore. They think they know things about you, and they project things on you." This is not about the poor, misfortunate author -- she wasn't even complaining, just saying -- but an illustration of how even positive expectations can interfere with truly seeing a person.

In another example, I had classified a woman I know as "not very adept with mechanical things." I had put her in that box in order to overcome a tendency toward impatience with her mistakes with mechanical things, so it was well meant -- and possibly true -- but I was glad I happened to be working on sofrosini when she asked me a computer question one evening, because it reminded me to be still and listen to her question -- in other words, to open the box and see if she really fit in it. She didn't, actually, and the conversation was more interesting and profitable to both of us than it would have been if I hadn't bothered to open the box.

I suppose it's necessary to say that I'm confident that St. Paul and St. Ephrem are not asking us to deny history, to disregard proven dangers or to ignore the intuition that is one of the voices sofrosini should pay attention to in the back of the bus. But most of the time, what I'm afraid of is not actual danger, but rather discomfort or embarrassment or something that won't do me any lasting harm at all.

What I've learned from short forays into sofrosini is that it's not just a moral good -- "good for you," like some nasty medicine -- but an existential good -- adventurous, exciting, sometimes scary, and dotted with delightful surprises -- "life and more abundantly," as Christ said. Another thing is that it doesn't take years of disciplined practice; it takes only this moment and my undivided attention. I've been surprised to find that St. Ephrem's prayer -- rather than being something dour and self-flagellating -- can be a door into the richness and potential of the moment.

I never thought I'd say this

2006-03-03T08:19:00.000-08:00

It's been a really bad week, and now, to top it all off, I find myself siding with Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown in a plagiarism lawsuit filed by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, the 1982 work of "nonfiction" that provided the central conspiracy of the Code.

They're arguing that his plagiarism consisted not in copying their words -- which is what plagiarism is -- but by adapting their ideas, which is dangerous for every fiction writer.

The irony is that in order to make their case, they all but have to acknowledge that HBHG is a fake -- I can't be sued for asserting that Lincoln died in 1865 -- that's a fact -- but apparently, if I were to write an alernative history based on a Lincoln-assassination conspiracy theory, itself based on a hoax, I could be sued for plagiarism (provided I made a lot of money).

Another irony is that the Code has already, no doubt, been a sales boost for HBHG. No doubt it was languishing in warehouses, if it hadn't gone out of print, before Brown gave it cachet by casting it in the form of a thriller romance.

Sheesh.

Fact-checker request

2006-02-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

Writing about the cartoon brouhaha in today's Opinion Journal, Muslim (I think Persian) Amir Taheri writes:

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead.

I have no animosity toward Taheri, and I hope his assessment of Islam is true, but I've always heard the influence of iconoclasm as going from Islam to Christianity. Which is it? Could it be both? (I've observed these confluent streams in many areas, from philosophy to politics to baby names.) Can anyone suggest any good source material where I could look it up?

I've been memed!

2006-02-05T08:22:00.000-08:00

I've been memed! (First time ever -- I'm very honored)

4 jobs you have had in your life:

Telephone receptionist at car dealership (used a PBX system like Lily Tomlin's Ernestine character)

College English teacher (freshman composition)

Word processor (sounds like something that comes out of a squeeze tube, and sometimes felt like it, too)

News editor

4 Movies You Could Watch Over and Over:

Steel Magnolias

Fantasia

Shall We Dance (1937)

The Gods Must Be Crazy (and sequel)

4 Places You Have Lived:

Milwaukie, Ore.

St. Francisville and Baton Rouge, La.

Columbia, Mo.

Portland, Ore. ("And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.")

4 TV Shows You Love To Watch

Stargate SG-1

Dead Zone

4 Places You Have Been On Vacation

Oregon (from Louisiana)

Louisiana (from Oregon)

Ozarks (from central Missouri)

San Juan Islands, Wash.

4 Websites You Visit Daily:

Fr. Joseph, really

Get Religion

Lucianne.com

National Review Online

4 Of Your Favorite Foods

Anything Greek

Butter beans with bacon

My first four-napkin hamburger after Lent

Latte

4 Places You Would Rather Be Right Now

Colony House, Rockaway Beach, Oregon

Byzantium, 9th century

Netherlands Antilles

At coffee with the Fabulous Crones

4 Bloggers You Are Tagging

Mimi

Thomas

Kevin Basil

Mark, who doesn't know me, but who is near to my heart for helping bring Orthodoxy to Baton Rouge

Dialects brown and pink

2006-02-04T12:34:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to a murder mystery on CD by Walter Mosley, titled Fear Itself, set in the brown community of Los Angeles of the 1950s. The POV character is a very literate bookstore owner who grew up in New Iberia, La. His friend and fellow hero is a less-educated man whose point of origin I seem to have missed. The POV character runs across people who have moved to LA from Mississippi, Illinois, Tennesee, as well as pink people.

The reader, Don Cheadle, does a great job of all the dialects. The author mentions what a variety of colors "Negroes" have in the 1950s, and the reader captures those colors in his voice.

The odd thing is that he doesn't do pink people as well. When brown actors or comedians try to imitate pink people, they tend to overemphasize their Rs, and the rhythm is just a little too clipped. It's not that brown people can't speak in a way that's indistinguishable from pink people -- see Condoleeza Rice (no politics, please, I'm just talking about dialects here) -- but in my experience, when I've heard people deliberately trying to "talk white," they didn't quite pull it off -- in the same way that some northern actors have trouble talking "southern" and pinks don't do a convincing job of "talking black" (although since I'm not an aficionado of rap and hiphop, that may have changed without my knowing it).

Maybe the problem is that there is no one "white" dialect, just as there's no one "black" dialect or one "Southern" dialect or one "Northern" dialect. When I went to school in Baton Rouge, La., I could tell what high school kids went to after just a couple of minutes of hearing them talk.

But that's not a hit against this reading of Fear Itself. Readers have plenty of chances to hear various "white" dialects -- from Italian-influenced New Jersey accents to Hispanic-Southern Texas to whatever planet Valley Girls come from. But I've never heard anybody do the brown American voices as well as Cheadle does in this reading.

A mother's grief

2006-02-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

The young mother sat on the floor beside the small white casket bedecked in white, pink and red flowers, and beside her sat a man in a dark suit and overcoat with a white scarf draped around his neck.

I had told her I planned to be here between 9 and 10 tonight, too late for the funeral vigil, which conflicted with school, and too early for the funeral Liturgy, which conflicted with work, but I wanted to spend a few minutes in prayer for this 12-year-old girl, whose suffering with leukemia was done, and her mother, father, grandmother and little brother, whose suffering was, if not beginning, then certainly intensifying.

I went to a chair as far away from them as I could and closed my eyes and tried to focus on the reason I had come. Before me, at the front of the church, an icon of Christ hung on a cross, his arms open in welcome and surrender. On the other side, the resurrected Christ pulls Adam and Eve from the place of the dead. On the iconostasis in front, he carries a book that reads, "You did not choose me. I chose you." Overhead a 12-foot-diameter Christ Pantocrator looks down, an icon that always makes me think of my childish view of God as someone who looks down on small creatures to see what they're up to now.

The voices came from the two sitting on the floor -- the child's parents, though I didn't know her dad. I couldn't hear the words, and was trying not to, but their quiet tones taunted my reluctant curiosity with the observation that the man was speaking English and the woman Russian. (In fact, she speaks excellent English with a Russian accent, but at that distance and volume, the Russian inflection, vowels and tone came across without the words.)

Above the altar, the Theotokos -- Virgin Mary -- sat enthroned with the child Christ on her lap. Mark Twain said that anyone over 40 is responsible for his own face, and it has to be part of the sorrow of losing a child never to know what sort of face she would create for herself. The Theotokos herself faced that specific sorrow (along with many others) -- her son was a young adult when he went to the cross and hadn't had time to "make" his own face in Twain's sense.

The dad collected himself, looked around the church, and left. The mother planned to spend the entire night there, alone if necessary. She began to read Psalms -- the same practice Orthodox Christians do from Holy Friday to the beginning of the Easter Vigil Liturgy on Holy Saturday -- we call it keeping watch at the tomb. I don't know if the funeral practice came first or the Paschal practice, but tying the two together, we experience it as a preparation for both separation and resurrection.

When parishioners pray the Psalms at the tomb of Christ, though, there's a sense of anticipation that none of us can avoid -- Pascha's coming; Pascha is almost here; soon we'll be crying, "Christ is risen!" and breaking eggs together and opening Pascha baskets and feasting.

But I heard the mother's voice, soft and yet clear, praying the anguish of David, and knew that Pascha is a very long way off for her, for she faces a seemingly endless Lent that she's aware hasn't really begun yet.

If you're praying people, please remember Irina, whose grief is unfathomable.

Schedules and change

2006-01-29T15:12:00.000-08:00

First the good news. Our Intrepid Editor is back from Australia and running the Onion Dome again. He's planning to put it to a monthly schedule and invites all you Orthodox satirists (of which there seem to be many -- which probably says something, but I won't speculate exactly what, about the Orthodox Church) to contribute. Send Orthodox humor pieces to our Intrepid Editor.

Closer to home (if "close to home" means anything on the Internet, which now that I think of it probably doesn't), I haven't been exactly daily about updating this blog. I've had to change my focus for now. I've got three big pursuits going on -- day job, court reporting school, novel. I've got to get through court reporting school so that I can change the day job. And the novel is something that I really want to get done. Something has to give, and it's blogging.

I'll be updating it, but I won't be commenting on passing political events or news items for the time being. What I put here will be stuff I think is important enough that I want to store it on Blogger's servers (I'd better keep it backed up, too, though). For example, I'm still trying to get a handle on the positives in the Prayer of St. Ephrem, and I'm reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as a guide to character development. I'll post something on that when I get something to post.

Oh, and for a good read check out Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word -- a history of the rise and fall, the ebb and flow of languages.

The 'Liturgy' of Tookie Williams

2006-01-02T08:18:00.000-08:00

Watching the brouhaha over the last days of Tookie Williams' life causes me to wonder how much the "liturgy" of death penalty opposition serves as an impetus to violent crime.

I mean "liturgy" in the sense of the structure of public spectacle, not the religious content -- though there certainly is a lot of that -- but what, say, an extraterrestrial might understand about our attitudes if he didn't understand our language at all.

Death penalty opponents refer to the liturgy of execution (though not in those words) when they talk about violence begetting violence, when they say it's equally barbaric to put murderers to death as for murderers to put their victims to death. We agree that pageants, spectacles and ceremonies matter, that these large public events communicate meaning and context beyond words, that they serve as a metamessage, in the sense that Deborah Tannen uses the word.

Now look at the metamessage of Tookie Williams, Mumia Abu-Jamal and any criminal you can think of on death row (and it seems that the more brutal the crime the more sympathetic the liturgy).

They become the center of attention for decades as their cases return again and again to the courts; Hollywood elites take up their cause; Williams gets books published under his name; there are Nobel Prize nominations; they are declared both innocent and repentant, sometimes by the same person and in the same breath. There are candlelight vigils, honorary citizenships in upscale countries. For the last few weeks of their lives, they dominate the media and are spoken of as if they have done some important benefit for society.

And their victims? Their names are scarcely mentioned, except in the context of their assailants. We know that Williams' first victim gurgled amusingly -- to Williams -- as he died. I saw a photo on the Internet of the young woman from Taiwan who was his fourth victim for which he was convicted -- half her face had been shot off. The reason for posting it was to build sympathy -- but as public spectacle, she looks pathetic; Tookie in his buff prison physique looks like a hero. Do we hear who loved the victims? Did any famous actors visit them? Did they get nominated for an award, even from the motel management association? Do we know who they loved, what they enjoyed, what they were good at?

It's as if the anti-death-penalty movement says of the murder victims, "Ah, well. Shit happens," and of the murderers, "This death is a inexcusable."

How can young people with a bent toward crime not look at that disparity and say they know who's powerful, who's got respect, who's the one to be reckoned with? Is it some guy who goes to work everyday in a gas station, or is it the one who kills him for $120 and kicks?

Here are a couple of ways to address the liturgy of the death penalty without sacrificing their principled stand against it.

First, show the same anguish over the death of every murder victim as for the murderers. It might take some effort -- a candlelight vigil after every local murder, for example, with mourners. Match candlelight vigils for the murderer on death row with give equal time to each and every victim. Make the speakers talk about the tragedy of the gas station attendant's death as well as the murderer's death. If there are prayer services for the murderer, then include the murder victims, by name. Nominate the victims for Nobel prizes. Split the murderer's legal defense fund equally with the families or favorite charities of all the victims. In other words, everything done for the murderer should be done equally or more so for each victim, by name.

Here's a coalition of churches in Oakland doing something similar. They wrapped a 700-person ring around a 10-mile section of the city where most of its murders happen. Rev. Keith Henderson of the True Fellowship Church started the event because, he says, he got tired of visiting morgues and doing funerals and decided to do something radical. The article doesn't say anything about capital punishment, but it would have been good for San Francisco's capital punishment opponents to swell the ranks.

Second, if the problem is really that the death penalty opponents feel squeamish about having the State end someone's life, consider this alternative. Call him dead, but don't kill him. Put him in a cell with no window, just one light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and leave him in solitary confinement until he dies of non-State-related causes. Give him food, water, and materials for basic sanitation. What he needs comes through a slot in the door, but he has no contact with anybody. If he kills himself, the state didn't do it. If he dies of a disease, the state didn't do it. If he lives to a ripe old age and then dies, the state didn't do it.

I would agree with death penalty opponents that a firing squad is more humane than that, but once, as a society, we've declared that killing is wrong, and true confinement is wrong, the next step is to abolish prisons entirely -- or to declare the prisoner's life sentence "served" after 20 years and release him.

Stephen Robinson, writing at the The Orthodox Way, presented the best case I've seen for capital punishment. If death penalty opponents want to see my reasons for supporting it, he captured them entirely. The purpose of this post is to ask death penalty opponents to look at what they're communicating by the tactics and techniques of their opposition.

Dog spirituality 1

2005-12-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

And the Lord said, "Do not let your front foot know what your back foot is doing."

H/T: Misspent.

Negatives in the prayer of St. Ephraim

2005-12-20T19:23:00.000-08:00

After 15 years in the Orthodox Church, I have seen the prayer of St. Ephraim come up on the Lenten horizon and sink behind Pascha often enough to know it without looking at the cheatsheet:

O Lord and Master of my life,
Take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk,
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to your servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own faults and not judge my brother,
For you are blessed unto ages of ages.
Amen.

During Lent, it's prescribed for every prayer time and -- as if the Church Fathers weren't sure we'd really get it -- more than once at a lot of them. And, of course, there's no rule against saying it the rest of the year.

The words, especially of the second and third lines, always seemed to hide some profound understanding of the spiritual life, the way those 3-D pictures a few years back purported to show a hidden picture if you held the thing up to your nose and crossed and uncrossed your eyes.

I never did see a hidden picture, but I think I've found a pattern in the "Take from me" line: sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.

Sloth is the idea that nothing I do matters. It's the sin of the parsimonious servant in the Parable of the Talents, the one who says to the Master, "What do you need me for? You can get everything you want by your own power. Here's yours back. Take it and leave me alone" (paraphrased).

The Master is angry, not because of the small return on investment (he apparently didn't expect -- or ask -- much of the servant, if the disparity in the investment capital is any indication), but because of the servant's lack of commitment and lack of trust.

Which leads to the second item -- despair -- the idea that, in the words of the third Psalm, "there is no help for him in God."

The servant not only believed he dare not do anything to increase the holdings; he also feared the master's hardness, expecting brutal treatment from him, and certainly not help, so he was left on his own, to handle his own problems.

Which leads to lust of power. One response to the frustration of having no meaningful role to play in life (the illusion that is sloth) and expecting no help from God (the illusion that is despair) is to try to take over the world oneself. It would be as if the faithless servant buried his own treasure in the ground and then tried to tell the other two what to do with theirs.

And if that doesn't work, there's always idle talk -- both outward and inward. It's the senseless chatter -- fruitless plans and imaginary arguments and self-justifications on the inside, meaningless bilge on the outside. (Some trivial conversation is part of the process of building relationship, so I'm not talking about that, but it's important, but not always easy, to discern the difference.) We use idle talk to shut out true thought, true understanding, which can be painfully revealing. In some ways idle talk is the opposite of lust of power; in other ways, it simply alternates with it, passive and aggressive reactions to sloth and despair.

Sloth is a sin we don't talk about much these days, because it's so often translated "laziness," giving us a picture of a man sitting in a hammock chewing a grass stalk and watching a creek flow. But we're too busy running around, making money, and controlling the world to be lazy in that way, and we're too full of inward chatter to be able to do nothing in that way.

So spiritual laziness is not rest -- the Psalmist also writes, in the same Psalm, "I lay down and slept. I awoke for the Lord sustained me." In other words, he gave himself over to the vulnerability of sleep, even in the midst of being under attack, and trusted in God to protect him. And God blessed his trust.

But if sloth is not rest but a belief that nothing we do matters, then it can lead to laziness -- being a couch potato, for example, is both sloth and idle talk -- or to horrible crimes -- armed robbery can be a combination of sloth and lust for power. It can cause someone to say, "I can't provide a million dollars to fund that school, so the $20 I have to give is worthless."

Or, "I can't be a great evangelist, so being a good cook is meaningless," or alternatively, "I can't cook worth beans (heh), so my gift for opening spiritual discussions with strangers is of no use to anyone." In other words, it can cause us to deny the value of our own talents (what is with that pun anyway? does it work in any languages beside English?) instead of seeing them as a unique and infinitely valuable contribution to the whole.

The Psalmist again (same Psalm) answers the whole line of the prayer: "But You, O Lord, are a shield for me, my glory and the one who lifts up my head."

"You, O Lord, are a shield for me . . . ." The shield, naturally, is protection, specifically from the many enemies in the Psalm ("Many are they who rise up against me; many are they who say of me, 'There is no help for him in God'"). But the "shield of faith" comes up again in Ephesians: "above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one." The fiery darts of the wicked one include both inner and outer dangers, just as broadening the interpretation of the Psalm includes both inner and outer voices saying, "There is no help for him in God."

With the shield of faith, the slothful servant would have overcome his fear of the Master's wrath, just as the Psalmist, tempted to despair, overcomes his fear that God might abandon him.

"You, O Lord, are . . . my glory . . . ." Glory is fame, respect, good reputation. It's exactly what the lazy servant refused the master in calling him a "hard man," reaping where he doesn't sow, and exactly what we promise -- and, at our best, give -- to God every time we sing,"Glory to you, O Lord, glory to you."

So if God is our glory, it's a reminder that if our task seems small -- or our investment capital insignificant -- it's God who glorifies us. Or that our reputation doesn't depend on people, many of whom say, "There is no help for him in God," but on God's declaration that we are "good and faithful servants."

"You, O Lord, are . . . the one who lifts up my head." I try to be careful with drawing too much of a conclusion from biblical gestures, because they can be so dependent on languages and translations, and something that has a perfectly obvious meaning in one cultural context can mean nothing or exactly the opposite in another. Nevertheless, I'll go out on a limb here and guess that throughout human society and history, a drooping head comes with sadness or depression. When someone is "downcast," we might say, "Chin up," or "Things are looking up"; we gently lift a child's chin and tell her to cheer up.

But the Psalmist says it's God himself who does this for his despondent children. This is not a master who is a "hard man," as the mistrustful servant says, but a God of lavish compassion.

The reality is that we do tumble through the sins of this line from St. Ephraim -- sloth, despair, lust of power and idle talk -- which is why I prefer the translation "take from me" rather than "give me not," even though I've heard from people whose Greek is much better than mine that "give me not" is more accurate.

The answer, again, comes from the third Psalm -- a simple prayer: "Arise, O Lord. Save me, O my God." If it can save the Psalmist from "ten thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around," it can save me from my lone worst enemy -- myself.

God's answer to the Psalmist and to everyone who calls on him ends the Psalm: "For you have struck all my enemies on the cheekbone; you have broken the teeth of the ungodly. Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be upon your people."

So here it is, a discovery that most people probably figured out the first time they read St. Ephraim's prayer. Apologies for the length of this post. I'm like a driver who learned how to get to a destination by a circuitous route and, when trying to give directions to the place, gives all the twists and turnings of that route because it's the only one I know. My consolation is that sometime in the next 15 years, I may figure out the next line.

How did I miss this?

2005-12-16T10:41:00.000-08:00

Soon after becoming Orthodox, I learned that we are 13 days out of step and 15 minutes late, and it didn't take all that long to learn to like it.

Now that I'm a pajama-clad blogger, I move Orthodox time into the news business, where this Sept. 5 article about a July event is news to me. But good news.

It's a Greek layman talking about joint meetings of the Orthodox Church in America and the Antiochian Orthodox Church, moving toward Church unity in North America. If you're Orthodox, you know how important such talks are. If you're not, here's a parable that might explain it.

Once upon a time there were three brothers that lived next door to each other in a village in Never Never Land. They were 10 years apart in age, so they weren't as close as they might have been, but it was a loving family, and they lived happily with their parents.

One day a local lord rode by, taking conscripts for the army, and the oldest one was drug away, never to return.

Ten years later, the lord's son rode by, taking conscripts for a different war, and the older of the two remaining brothers was drug away, never to return.

Finally, ten years later, the lord who had defeated the prior lord came by, taking conscripts for yet another war, and dragged away the last of the three sons, leaving mother and father impoverished and longing for their children, who never returned.

The three sons didn't die in the wars. They survived honorably, fell in love, settled down, and when opportunity arose, they took their wives and families to another place where they could live in peace and their children not be kidnapped into servitude.

They contacted their parents, who begged them to come home, but the sons replied that they were at home now and couldn't come back.

In the meantime they had all settled in the same city. But the brothers had never really known each other, and a resentment had grown among them through the years, with the younger ones feeling abandoned by the older and the older feeling that the younger didn't know how they had suffered. They were all struggling to get along in the new land and all tried to preserve the customs they had learned from their parents, as they remembered them, modified by the countries where they'd lived during their long exile.

But their children and grandchildren began to discover each other and find that they had more in common than differences. Others in the city also became members of the family, through marriage and friendship, and they had interest in, but no attachment to the customs that the family had acquired during the patriarchs' exile; they wanted to be part of the original family, from the old, old country.

So by small steps and slow persuasion, the children and grandchildren closed the gap among the brothers, and finally brought them all together into one family, of blood relations and the new kind of kin, acknowledging the original parents as their ancestors and celebrating the courageous journeys of the three brothers. They finally gathered in one house at one table and proclaimed themselves brothers again.

This is a parable, not an allegory. It doesn't faithfully portray the history of the divisions among American Orthodox, which is long and complicated and better detailed in many other elsewheres. But if you imagine this as a movie and the audience's emotion as the credits rolled over the joyful, tear-stained faces of the aged men, then you know how we Orthodox look at prospects of reunion among our scattered jurisdictions.

UPDATE: I cross-posted this to the Conciliar Press blog.

Rev. Ned update

2005-12-14T23:14:00.000-08:00

We last heard from Rev. Ned Reidy back in June when he wrote an article congratulating the Orthodox on ordaining women deacons.

A little googling turned up the fact that he's in a "let's play Catholic and have women priests" community, and a commenter (comment since lost) said that he had formerly been a member of the Holy Cross (Catholic) religious order.

Well, the Rev. Ned is back, says Get Religion, and in full Galileo mode, as he faces a trial for, I kid you not, heresy. (In California? gasp!)

Get Religion takes up the oddity that the San Bernardino Diocese seems to be the only one in the United States that does heresy trials -- along with the fact that it's hard to be excommunicated when you've already started up with a different church, but there seems to be a question of brand identification or something. Get Religion refers to the story in the PE.com as a well-written article with various experts interviewed.

I still get google searches for Rev. Ned, so I thought I'd pass along the update.

On the Incarnation

2005-12-14T18:05:00.000-08:00

Unvoiced, the Godhead spoke the world
And unflesh hands made man.
Time's Creator, not bound by time,
More distant than the sky,

Who willed to be in place and time
Confined, Who healed and taught
With hands and voice of matter born,
Was one of us, though God.

Closer now than one's own heart,
Time deep and cosmos wide,
Enfleshed in fallen hands and tongues,
He builds and calls the world.

God grant them freedom

2005-12-13T10:03:00.000-08:00

This photo of an Iraqi woman sporting her vote-stained finger is a picture of courage. By the ink of a tattoo, she has marked herself a Christian in a country where Christianity is not always safe, and by the ink on her finger, she stands for a new Iraq in a time when the Rhinoceroses would kill her for that, too, if they could.

So may God grant them freedom and us the courage to stand with them in a way that honors their courage, and that of our military.

Carnival of the Clueless

2005-12-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

After I entered Stephen Schwartz in the 25th Carnival of the Clueless, I got a letter proving him even more clueless than I had thought. It started "Hey stupid" and went downhill from there.

Last night I read a column about an e-mail exchange between Larry Elder and a reader who disputed his facts. If Mr. Schwartz ever comes back to my "pathetic blague," he might do well to follow the link and learn how a person with intelligence, class and discretion deals with a disagreeing, even disagreeable, correspondent.

A public apology

2005-12-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

This is a public admission of arrogance to two bishops and a Protestant television celebrity. A couple of days ago, I posted a snarky comment about a Russian archbishop calling Krishna Satan, and then I drew a comparison to Pat Robertson and my bishop, Tikhon, and suggested that they all go to Antarctica together. To all three, I offer profound apologies. It's not that I think Archbishop Nikon was correct; it's that, first, who am I to sentence anyone to exile, and second why bring in Pat Robertson or Bishop Tikhon, neither of which had anything to do with it?

I thought about just deleting the post, but then I decided that this is more appropriate.

Let me do my disagreement with Archbishop Nikon more better.

I begin with the Kontakion of Pentecost:

When the Most High came down and confused the tongues,
He divided the nations;
But when He distributed the tongues of fire,
He called all to unity.
Therefore, with one voice, we glorify the all-holy Spirit!

The nations, as we know, are still divided, and the task of calling all to unity has fallen to the Church, empowered with the Holy Spirit. But the fact that we are divided doesn't mean that those on the outside are necessarily rebelling against the Cosmos, harmony with God -- they may be following to the best of their understanding -- more or less, and often more than, say, I am, who am supposedly blessed with the Holy Spirit.

So how can we give the Good News to people who have grown up not knowing it? If someone comes to me and says, "Everything you think is good is evil. Everyone you thought loved you has deceived you. Let me turn your world upside down and give you a life of dissension and chaos," I'm not going to be much inclined to listen.

Instead we can say, "Everything that you know that is true is True. Everything that you know that is good is Good. Everything that you know that is beautiful is Beautiful. Like everyone who learns and grows, you may have to throw away some fond beliefs on the way to a better understanding of what's True and Good and Beautiful, but you'll count them as dross in light of the greater Truth, Goodness and Beauty that you'll find." Then if we follow it up with deeds of mercy and compassion, we may find some who will listen. Others won't, but as St. Paul says, one plants, another waters, and God gets the harvest.

This is true whether we're talking to Hindus, Moslems, Native Alaskans or 21st-century agnostic skeptics. We owe a gentler touch to people outside the Church than to those within. After all, St. Nicholas punched out the archheretic Arius, not his pagan neighbors.

That's what I should have said about Archbishop Nikon's comments, and not what I did say.

Hey stupid

2005-12-09T21:13:00.000-08:00

Begins the big comeback from my new acquaintance Stephen Schwartz, recently heard from waxing starry-eyed about prospects for an Albanian Kosovo. I had already planned to post his reply -- seems only fair, after all, to let him have his say -- when he kindly extended his permission.

So here it is, in its entirety, with breaks for comments:

Une flas shqip. Do you know that means? It means I speak Albanian.

Actually, no. Dare I ask? Have I just posted some flawlessly obscene idiomatic Albanian insult, or does it literally mean "I speak Albanian"? Being stupid, I've only studied French, Greek, Russian and Spanish, and though I'm not conversational in any of them -- not being a globetrotting journalist with many opportunities to polish my language skills -- I could figure out how to say, "I speak [language]," in all of them. I won't do it, though; it would be showing off.

I first went to the Albanian area of Yugoslavia in 1991. I worked in Kosovo in 1999-2000 and returned to the area in 2003 as well as this year.

My mistake. Being caught up in the dreary mundanities of Stateside life, I haven't read his entire opus.

You can't even read English. The guy who wants to publish the American founding fathers is an Albanian from Albania, not a Kosovar.

My error again. And actually, my impression of the Albanian Albanians is that they've been drug through the mill, first by Hoxha, and then, just as they were starting to get on their feet again, by a bunch of hucksters posing as capitalists, and yet there's remarkable harmony among the ethnic and religious groups there. Again, I'm not a globetrotting journalist who speaks Albanian, merely a stupid American who tries to sift the truth out of the news and who knows some people who have spent time there and loved the Albanian people. Is is safe to point out that these people were Orthodox Christians?

I have written on the Greater Albania issue since 1990. I have published more on Wahhabism in Kosovo and the Albanian lands than any other foreign writer.

See above about not catching the opus.

You should also go back and check out the fact that THE WEEKLY STANDARD supported the Kosovo intervention, regardless of your opinion of Clinton and Albright.

I'm aware that a lot of conservatives thought it was a pretty neat idea to "bomb Serbia into the Stone Age." I believe a lot of them were impatient with the bad behavior among the divorcing Yugoslavs, and the U.S. media, tired of trying to figure out who was right and what was really going on, finally just landed on a bad guy to villify (Let's see, Muslims are exotic; Catholics have the Vatican; that leaves the Serbs. OK, Serbs are wholly bad and the others are wholly innocent. See how easy that is? It totally works on TV.) Then with a good deal of selective reporting, some "revised" voice-over translation of Serbian "man in the street interviews," and some high-class public relations, it became easy to maintain a settled paradigm. But that excuse doesn't work for people who have been following the issue as globetrotting journalists since 1990.

Nevertheless, even from my sheltered stupidity, I remember when Richard Holbrooke stiff-armed the religious leaders of the former Yugoslavia -- Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim -- who had together authored a letter to all their people asking them to eschew violence. He visited Milosevic and the KLA (and don't miss the photo at the link of Holbrooke lounging with armed thugs), but didn't have an hour to spend with the bishops and the imam. It was a time when the diplomatic apparatus of the most powerful country in the world sent a message by its behavior -- the message that the people who mattered in Yugoslavia were the thugs in power. Beside that, Holbrooke calling Serbs "murderous assholes" on television in 1995 was just part of the Clinton approach to diplomacy.

The fact that the Weekly Standard has been so supportive of Clinton's abysmal foreign policy is part of why I don't read the publication much and therefore haven't followed Mr. Schwartz's opus more carefully.

Mr. Schwartz continues:

You write:

1. "why investigators couldn't find evidence of the Kosovo massacres that were the pretext for the assault on Serbia;"

A lie. There are 550 mass grave sites. Everyone knows about them.

Call me a liar if you want to. It's the same definition of "lie" that the Democratic Underground uses against Bush. But the link I gave in my earlier post has the World Court saying that the "mass graves" contain 5,000 bodies. This is, as Detective Sgt. Brian Honeybourn points out, a great evil, but not genocide. It's also not entirely clear that Serbs did all the killing. After-the-fact investigations have turned up evidence that some of the pivotal "massacres" never happened. Or maybe they did, but how many of the victims were killed by Serbs and how many by the KLA? "Everybody" apparently knows a lot of stuff, but when the reporters are so biased, we stupids in the hinterlands don't believe them at all.

2. "about the mass graves of Serbs discovered in Kosovo since the war;"

And where were these? There were a couple of gravesites I know of with fewer than two dozen Serbs altogether in them. They were fully investigated at the Hague. Place names? You don't know what you're taking about. I doubt you could find Kosovo on a map.

3. "and why Kosovo Albanians, set free to create a society in their own image, made it twice as much of a hell as the one Milosevic created for them."

How would you know? What do you know? Nothing. Kosovo is flourishing. But they have yet to be set free.

I honestly hope it's true. Here's a story of a courageous Serb family trying to return to their life in Kosovo. But here's an analysis that suggests that "flourishing" may not be exactly the adjective for it: "Why now? Kosovo has no economy to speak of, no one in authority able to push through privatization, and consequently high unemployment. Hideously abused in the past by the Serbs, the Kosovar Albanians are now on top and have been wreaking vengeance on the Serb minority in their midst, capped last year by the ransacking of churches and a monastery. This naturally stirs strong feelings in Serbia proper, even with Slobodan Milosevic away in custody. Without a functioning judicial system, organized crime in Kosovo is flourishing, so much so that it poses a threat to the entire region."

It's late, and I'll let Mr. Schwartz go on uninterrupted for a while:

4. "Oh, and while he's at it, he might have looked into human trafficking,"

Human trafficking largely involves activity by members of the international community, and Serbian gangsters, using Moldovan women and Ukrainian women to service said internationals. North Albanians, Kosovars, and Albanians from Macedonians do not get involved in this. If you think different, cite cases: indictments, names of the accused, dates of arrests, etc.

"drug dealers" Cite the names of the indicted, accused, dates of arrests, etc. They don't exist. The drug routes run from eastern Macedonia through south Serbia to Belgrade and from Greece through southern Albania to Italy. You can't cite any evidence otherwise. You are a victim of your own bigotry abetted by propagandists.

"and weapons markets." Albanians like guns. So what? You aren't for the second amendment? I am. They are. Deal with it. The gun market is in north Albania, not in Kosovo.

OK. I take it back. None of the links I provided had any information. I don't have dates and places, and the people who have access to dates and places have agendas that are preserved by not publishing them. So there are no drug dealers, no human traffickers and no Al-Qaeda-trained terrorists among the Kosovo Albanians.

The comparison with Kristallnacht is the usual kind of sloppy, morally despicable slobber one can expect from a comfortable American pseudo-intellectual sitting in a couch in pajamas.

I don't use these comparisons lightly, but I think the similarities are very strong between the Night of Broken Glass and the anti-Serb riots that ripped through Kosovo in March of last year. By the way, it was a UN administrator who made the comparison before I did.

As to the heart-breaking spectacle of vandalized Serb churches (sob!) -- the churches that were targeted were mainly recent foundations built to symbolize Serbian domination.

Hearing such hostility to a faith's religious structures makes me wonder if Mr. Schwartz is perhaps a Christian who hates the Orthodox, a Christian who hates Serbs, or a non-Christian who hates Christians. But I'm not asking for an answer to that question. Suffice to say that the hate is evident. On the other hand, he does ascribe considerable foresight to the Christians of the 14th through early 20th centuries, to know where to built churches to symbolize Serbian domination.

The old Orthodox monasteries, which were stolen by the Serbs from their Macedonian and Vlach builders, were largely left alone.

Is that why Decani has to be under constant guard, after its monks rescued Albanians during the war?

Do you know the story of the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Warsaw? It was a gigantic Orthodox structure built by the tsars to symbolize Russian power over Poland. When Poland became independent in the 1920s it was demolished and there is no trace of it today. Just as there will soon be no trace of the Japanese governor's palace in Seoul, Korea. Why should Albanians be held to a different standard than Poles or Koreans? To make foreign Serbophiles happy? Sorry, no thanks.

Even this "foreign Serbophile" was saddened by the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

All comments on the record; I will post them to your pathetic blague if you don't.

Stephen Schwartz

P.S. [in follow-up e-mail]: The Serbian government now admits what happened in Kosovo: the Serbs attempted to expel the Albanians, killed many of them, including many children, destroyed many structures, etc. etc.

As a matter of fact, the Serbs are the only ones who admit that their side has done any wrong. It's part of their bad PR, and it's part of why I, as a stupid American who can't find Kosovo on a map (it's next to Ecuador, right?), think it's important to stand up for them every once in a while. I mean, Mr. Schwartz may call me names, but he's not likely to bomb my house.

UPDATE, DEC. 10: I edited out a reference to Michel Chossudovsky in the piece above, because his stand on other matters led me to doubt his credibility. For more information on the Kosovo Liberation Army, from a more authoritative and balanced source, here is a U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee report on the KLA filed one week after the war on Serbia began in 1999.

Kristallnacht? I didn't see any Kristallnacht

2005-12-09T00:24:00.000-08:00

Stephen Schwartz, writing in the otherwise conservative Daily Standard, goes looking for white hats in the Balkans and finds them -- on the same heads blessed by Madeline Albright and Richard Holbrooke.

Schwartz manages to find a Kosovo Albanian who reads American founding fathers and a couple of others who assert that there's no plan for a Greater Albania and that Kosovo Albanians don't like Wahabbism.

Great. Life is simple if you only listen to one side of these messy situations.

In the meantime Schwartz, who seems to have arrived in Kosovo within the past couple of days, needs someone to explain to him about those piles of blasted rubble that used to be churches; why Serbs who have lived their whole lives in Kosovo -- including monks who gave shelter to Albanians running from Milosevic's troops -- aren't safe to leave their dwellings; why NATO troops need to spend more effort protecting Serbs from Kosovars than vice versa; why investigators couldn't find evidence of the Kosovo massacres that were the pretext for the assault on Serbia; about the mass graves of Serbs discovered in Kosovo since the war; and why Kosovo Albanians, set free to create a society in their own image, made it twice as much of a hell as the one Milosevic created for them. Oh, and while he's at it, he might have looked into human trafficking, drug dealers and weapons markets.

The answers to those questions might have made for at least a paragraph somewhere in his "It's a beautiful morning" story. The questions might have at least come up in his conversations with the "democracy-loving" Kosovars he talked with. Unfortunately, it's an opportunity lost and a whitewash perpetrated.

Is there a country where we can send Archbishop Nikon and Pat Robertson?

2005-12-07T13:06:00.000-08:00

This headline from the Hindustan Times online edition tells the whole story: Russian Archbishop calls Lord Krishna 'Satan.'

Maybe Antarctica, where they can melt the ice pack by hurling burning epithets at each other. And let's add Bishop Tikhon while we're at it.

Note: It's not good evangelism to call other people's religious figures "Satan" (unless the people are actually Satanists). It should be obvious, but apparently isn't, that you build better relationships with people by honoring their highest impulses. It's something the members of the original Alaska mission, as well as Sts. Cyril and Methodius, understood.

UPDATE: I apologized for this post here.

Christ-hate

2005-12-05T16:52:00.000-08:00

We'll be hearing a lot of Christ-hatred, apparently, with the release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Up till now I've been mostly running across Philip Pullman, getting quoted all over the place in his efforts to become the anti-Lewis and to keep interest in his own books going 10 years after the movie release. I don't think it will work, but the aim -- even if duplicitous -- is at least rational.

Now Polly Toynbee, writing in the UK Guardian, reveals the depths to which hatred of Christianity can go.

Just to clear up one thing, I think she's got a point when she says some Christians have used guilt to manipulate children:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion's breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged.

I've read a book by a Catholic priest, containing various meditations on the stations of the cross. They were all awful (though the priest was a kind-hearted, well-meaning soul), but the meditation "for children" was hideous, containing just the sort of guilt-smack Toynbee says her mother got from the nuns. The result, as so often happens when guilt -- as it inevitably does -- goes sour, is a soaring rage full of fear, shame at having been duped, and a wall that keeps one from looking at the situation in any light but one's own defensive anger.

But however pitiably Toynbee came by her rage, her view is still warped by it.

At the core of her argument with Aslan -- and with Christ -- is that He's not just the Lamb but also the Lion.

Christ should surely be no lion (let alone with the orotund voice of Liam Neeson). He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight.

For Toynbee, Christ must always be "gentle Jesus, meek and mild," certainly not "a mighty fortress." She mocks the idea of a powerful Christ: "Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America -- that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right."

Lewis, a British citizen, was neither was neither Republican nor Democrat, certainly not as those parties align themselves in the dawning years of the 21st century. What Toynbee fails to understand -- or, understanding, hates -- is that in fairy stories good people are rewarded and bad people punished; heroes become kings and queens, and villains get their comeuppance. The Church is not a place for rolling over and letting the bad guy kick you; it's an army of martyrs who laughed at death and saints who killed dragons and cities protected from marauding armies by an icon of the Theotokos.

She says that in Great Britain 43 percent of people polled didn't know what event Easter celebrates. How much of that ignorance and disdain is due to the "sensitive," "mild" and "inoffensive" cup of weak tea that Christianity has become? Toynbee would like to keep it that way, but Toynbee, as she says herself, is no friend of the Church.

And Aslan, the Lion who plays like a being at once thunderstorm and kitten, may be a worthy opponent to such a view. The fact that Toynbee is so upset is a sign of hope.

Talkin' dog

2005-12-04T22:05:00.000-08:00

I've been working to learn to speak dog most of my life. Most of my dogs have done better at learning my language than I have at learning theirs, but over time, I've gotten better at it.

For instance, if you want to tell a dog that you're friendly, start at a high pitch and work down to a low pitch. Words are optional. Babytalk is fine, such as "Oh, what a good puppy." For added emphasis, wave your arm behind your back as if it's a tail. Dogs don't see well, and they don't make distinctions between arms and tails. People, unfortunately, do see well, and they are likely to think the tail thing is a bit of overkill, if not utterly mad. Proceed at your own risk. Also, of course, if you've violated some other dog protocol, such as crossing into restricted territory or seeming to threaten its pack, making friendly noises may not help. It can't hurt either.

If you want to speak warning, on the other hand, a staccato, "Bark! Bark! Bark" is the standard doggie alarm. If your dog says that to you, it's something the dog considers worth noting. (It may be a cat moseying down the street, but the dog considers that noteworthy.)

Or if it's time for sleep, a long breath expelled through the nose is a signal that it's time to calm down.

Now ABC News gives us another one. Researchers are calling it a "laugh," which is probably as good a name as any. Just for an experiment, I did a loud, long pant, as described in the article, to Sadie and Mocha, my dog teachers, who were sleeping nearby. Sadie got up and brought me a tug toy. Mocha got up and corrected my pronunciation -- it should be done with a rounded mouth, as if you've taken a large bite of a too-hot roasted marshmallow and are trying to cool it off before it burns your mouth. She congratulated me on my efforts before lying back down and releasing a long breath through her nose.

This is just my first attempt at dog-laughing. Anybody else have results to report (those who aren't the sort of people to look askance at using a spare arm as a tail on occasion)?

I can't wait to see the movie

2005-12-04T08:19:00.000-08:00

It's like Chinatown, the 1974 film noire with Jack Nicholson investigating a simple adultery case that ends up revealing crime and corruption up through the highest levels of Los Angeles city authority.

Only more so. The murder of a couple of gangsta rap musicians points to corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department, a coverup benefiting the then-police chief (who is now a city council member), aided and abetted by an apparently corrupt and complicit Pulitizer Prize-winning music reporter at the LA Times.

With the outcome that the Times bends its trial coverage so the repoter's buddy, a rap music producer, gets acquitted.

Chinatown is film noire in color; Jan Golab's piece is film noire in nonfiction.

H/T: Patterico.

Wait -- what have I been laughing at all this time?

2005-12-02T20:13:00.000-08:00

Al Sharpton wants his own sitcom

OK, guys, fun's over -- who hid the passengers?

2005-12-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

More random searches for passengers at US airports