The Dancer from the Dance

Framing is a device whereby writers may take a work from the past, build upon it characters and circumstances of current relevance, then proceed to forge a conclusion. The notion of framing has been with you much of this year because of a persistent combination of students in classes asking questions about the practice, thoughts of your own about a short-story cycle, plus the reappearance in various book reviews you've written. Most recently there was the association between Richard Price of Lush Life, and Honore de Balzac of Pere Goriot fame and of course Balzac's use of Lear as a frame for Goriot.

Was it thus coincidence that you were drawn to An Iliad by Alessandro Barrico? Did it have anything to do with a discussion you had with Liz Kuball about her project to interview ten photographers on her blog site, and the highly personal and craft-related questions she contrived for each of her interviewees? Was it influenced by your buddy Ernest Sturm from the Department of French and Italian at UCSB, who had just gone from a work (in French) Du Critique, to a play that reminded both of us of Beckett and collaterally evoked a longish discussion about individual process? And what about your table-thumping encomium about W.B. Yeats and his process, causing Ernest to bring up the editorial oversight on Eliot's poetry not only by Pound but by Vivienne Eliot?

Yes to all the above, to the point where you are aware that the specifics of craft cannot be taught to another, they can be hinted at, approached obliquely, yes, even absorbed by constant work. So here you are, thinking about a story cycle framed on The Odyssey, featuring a character based on Odysseus but not nearly so eloquent, an actor returning home after appearing in a Broadway production of Troilus and Cressida. The thing that got you onto the idea in the first place came after one of the stories appeared in a small journal and someone noted that the protagonist's last name, Bender, was a neat analog for the translation of Odysseus' name, a man of many turns.

Fun by all accounts. Some of the stories are done to your satisfaction and, you notice, one of them, written before the connection to The Odyssey appeared to you, uses the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis as a framing device: After a night of uneasy dreams, Matthew Bender awoke to discover he had turned into Cindy's boyfriend.

That will have to go. Cindy may turn out to be Circe. Maybe not.

But while we're on the subject, and simply to get it down on record, what other frames come to your mind as a trampoline for a contemporary landscape?

And of course your first answer is The Canterbury Tales, with its richness of characters, its unrelenting display of voice and satire, its presentation of an index of the human condition that has changed little in six hundred odd years. You can see John McCain as the Knight, and what splendid mischief to frame The Pardoner's Tale and your everlasting favorite, The Wife of Bath. Of course you yourself would be cast in the role of Melibee, he whom Harry Baily cuts off early in his tale because, "Thy drasty rhyme is not worth a toord."

The unwritten law in framing is not to have the effect or outcome rely on the framing; just as the original stood erect on its own for you, your use of it must stand frim on its own legs, its own voice, its own portraits of individuals.

All right. There you have it. Perhaps more will reveal itself to you as you essay the review of Barrico's An Iliad.

Writers' Groups: Suburban Dystopias

A dystopia is a universe into which a terrible wrong has been or is about to be done ; a culture in which someone we are made (induced) to care about stands in danger of being creamed by the juggernaut of a particular culture.

The eponymous protagonist of Jane Eyre is not only about to be dumped out of the orphanage and onto the streets, where her prospects of finding a job are not bright, she is told in sympathetic candor by the head mistress of the orphanage that she has yet another hitch to overcome, her lack of beauty. She is, ugh! plain. In many ways the world into which Jane sets forth is the dystopia of class in the England of her day, particularly for women.

Guy Montag, protagonist of the iconic dystopia Fahrenheit 451, has what James Joyce referred to as agenbite of inwit, the remorse of conscience which is snowballing in effect as he pursues his assigned task of burning books. (I can't wait to see Ray Bradbury at the forthcoming Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, to discuss with him the similarity between the book burners and the "fired" U.S. Attorneys.)

Harry Bosch, Michael Connolly's loner from the LAPD, is also a protagonist who sets out in the dystopic world of Los Angeles, protected and served (to quote from their motto) by its police department.

These are a mere sprinkling of characters who must function in a dystopia. Winston Smith had his work cut out for him by his creator, George Orwell, and Eva, much more than a three-letter crossword puzzle clue when she appears in Ms. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, quickly learns she is in a dystopia. And so, as the late, lamented creator of many a dystopia would have said, it goes.

In many ways, all novels are dystopic because it is the inherent nature of story to have something wrong or about to be wrong with a given culture, and so I am not having to force too hard the shoe tree of dystopia into the tight shoe of story.

Dystopias give us pause to wonder what if, what if a social or political or scientific theory advances too far. What if They, whoever They are, come Here, wherever Here is, and gradually outnumber Us?

What about the writers of dystopia, writers whose characters must enter some highly charged atmosphere in order to pursue some dream, solve some puzzle, attempt to work at some craft in which they wish to excel? What about writers, still in the process of learning their craft, finding themselves in the dystopia of the writing group?

The single thing most in danger of being swatted in a writers' group or class is the voice of the individual writer, thanks to the committee-type approach to dealing with material and the sense many group members feel about offering critique taken from Aristotle's Poetics. To be sure, there are enormous possibilities for like-minded writers to catch some detail that might have been missed, but there is also the danger of a kind of standardization being inflicted on the individual by the group.

What to do? How to cope with the workshop situation?

First and foremost, the workshop leader must treat the members in the group the same way an editor treats or deals with authors, as one professional to another as opposed to teacher to student. Suggestions are offered, posed as possibilities, not as absolutes.

My own approach is to regard the complication or dystopia of the particular novel or story, try to put it into the most apparent context, then look for a way to suggest to the author that the complication or conflict can be enhanced. My goal is to push the author to see an even worse-case scenario that the one now present before us, a scenario dire to the point of causing the author some amount of sweat. By pushing the author to the point where the unthinkable emerges out of the story, the author has nothing to fall back on, no tricks or devices, only the artistry of understanding the multifarious range of possibilities within the human schemata.

One of the most prestigious writing programs in the U.S. tends, in my idiosyncratic opinion, to produce graduates who largely sound like one another, which, in my idiosyncratic opinion,is not an effective end result. On the other side of this coin, a writer who, in my idiosyncratic opinion, has one of the most remarkable voices, is a graduate of that school, which leads me to believe that Daniel Woodrell had such a vision of the worlds he writes about that even editorial suggestions given by his literary agent and book editors become quickly translated to the voice in which he speaks with such authority and grace.

How do we encourage writers to sound like themselves? When we deal with them, we do our best to find ways to point out to them how to make their own dystopias more dystopic--how to make the unthinkable become even more unthinkable, and to bring it to pass in a way that is so plausible as to send a shiver through Franz Kafka's ghost; then we sit around and cheer as they try to work their way out.

Amicus Curiae

Writers, whether they intend it or not, are judges; they judge history, they judge the present, they judge the individuals in these places and the places of their imagination, and yes, they judge each other. Writers are simultaneously juries, prosecutors, attorneys for the defense; they are the defendant and the accused, all rolled up into one and expected by their craft to render a considered verdict on every matter that comes before them.

In the legal profession, an amicus brief is a considered opinion, a gloss, on a matter before the court. Writers do have friends. Some of these friends are:

1. books

2. other writers

3. actors

4. musicians

5. painters

6. photographers

7. chefs

8. dogs

9. cats

10. editors

Writers have a reference shelf and a to-read shelf, things to be consulted, search engines, as it were. At the very minimum, the ten friends listed above should be considered a part of the writers' reference shelf.

Among my favorite books are The Canterbury Tales, because its characters and language still stand after six hundred years; the collected poetry of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Marianne Moore, all of whom I have increasing hopes of understanding, if everything continues on schedule; Macbeth because of the way it introduced me to politics and point of view; The Trial by Franz Kafka, for showing the way to get past the reader's defenses and into the heart of his complaint; Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi, which were the only text books on writing I return to at every stage of my life; Tales of the Jazz Age by Fitzgerald because they awakened me to the immensity of the short story; ditto The Long Valley by John Steinbeck, The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury, and the Knopf Collected Stories by John Cheever. The opening paragraphs of All the Kings' Men by Robert Penn Warren, and the stunning humor of "Spotted Horses" by William Faulkner, and The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler turn my heart to instant oatmeal.

Numbers 2 through 6 on the list serve as a constant reminder that we are all preoccupied with time and how it affects the work we do, whether it is capturing an image or pacing a performance or judging an event. By looking at and listening to these worthies, we understand how to transmit, say, the photographic equivalent of shutter speed to a short story or a novel, how to PhotoShop point of view. We listen to the monologues of George Burns and Jack Benny and we learn all the better how to withhold information until the right moment, strengthening the tie of these two performers to Mark Twain. We learn how an exaggerated pair of eyebrows, a shambling gait, and an eye for the absurd transforms Julius Marx into an integral archetype struggling to break free within every male.

Number 7 is vital; we must be on good terms with at least one first rate food preparer. Not to disparage peanut butter and jam sandwiches, eaten for fuel when the creative flame has us at our work; not to raise an eyebrow at a can of Franco-American spaghetti, eaten cold out of a can under similar work-intensive or financially burdensome times; rather to remind us that a splendid meal and a glass or six of a fruity pinot noir reminds us that the inner man is sensual, too.

Dogs and cats are quintessential extensions of ourselves. When I was living in a one-bedroom apartment within hearing distance of the Hollywood Freeway, writing a pulp novel a month for a ridiculously small advance, a cat came into my life, a cat the likes of which I have only approximated, a cat who opened for me the doors to growth, understanding, and a sense of what true companionship was all about. Sam, the cat, opened my eyes to Blue, the Blue-tick hound, and from that point on, I knew that fountain pens, typewriters, and, now, laptops are only one part of the tool kit--the other essential ingredient is a proper writers' dog.

Every now and then an editor will ask me a question about something I have written, my answer to which makes me realize that if I have a blind spot for accuracy, the editor does not. I am frequently reminded of an interview I listened to on radio in which Somerset Maugham told of making it a point to send an enormous bouquet of flowers to his copyeditor and to arrange a lavish dinner for his content editor, each of whom, he argued, had contributed considerably to saving him from an embarrassment.

If we as writers are to be friends of the court in which we practice the laws of humanity, observing fully the rigors of our craft, we need all the friends we can get.

Readers? Listeners? Viewers? They are not friends, they are clients. To them we owe at least as much if not more than we can ever hope to know.