Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, X

In our daily wading through the streams of ideas and language with which we seek familiarity in our chosen craft, there is invariably up there in the stream ahead of us the flashing metaphor of the tail of a dam-building beaver or a speckled trout, seeking a fly to finish off its lunch.  With luck, we catch full sight of these metaphorical notions, these ideas and excellent arrangements of words that, in combination, become the stories we write about.

Because we are writers and, by nature, curious to see how the other ladies and gents in the craft are doing, we read.  We read particular writers because their work has so many flashes of wording or idea.  In some cases our favoring these writers we read is so complex and demanding that we scarcely take the time to articulate what it is about their work that so beckons to us.  It is important to step out of--to continue the metaphor--the streams of our own language and time, going back into the past, going to other places as well.

Aha, I can already hear some of you young and middle-aged writers with a particular complaint:  I only have the one language.  It is not quite fair that you, because of your shall we call it generational access to other languages have an advantage.  You and your brother and sister geezers have heard middle-Eastern and perhaps Asian languages at one time or another.  And some of you, the complaint continues, actually have been instructed in Latin and Greek, making your wading streams and fishing holes and wine-dark seas all the more diverse.

All these arguments may hold some weight.  I did persist in my studies of Spanish from about grade five onward, and I did live in places where I picked up enough awareness of profanity to be able to render racial, social, and sexual insults in a number of tongues, but to make my point here, I'm going to speak of other writers, writers to the north of us and considerably to the east, both groups of which speak an English that is only a cousin to our English.  I start with my favorite, a man who wrote one of what I consider the most splendid, evocative lines that transcend his being English and me an American.  He is the poet, John Keats, dead since 1831.  The line of which I speak is from his poem "The Eve of St. Agnes."  It is, in fact, the third line of the poem:


 ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass...

After the many times I have read the poem, by the time I reach that line, I have no doubt it is cold when, shortly, we meet a lonely herdsman, at his prayers and rosary, his fingers quite numb --quite in keeping with the other creatures of this vision of a dramatic moment.

I am similarly fond of the novels of my Canadian neighbor, Janette Winterson, whose writings about love reveal yet other dimensions of that remarkable state; as well I treasure the mordant wit of her fellow Canadian, Mordecai Richler, and the mischievous, rollicking possibilities of mocking solemnity that find their way in and about the works of Robertson Davies.

And true enough, writing in his native Australian English, the splendid poet Les Murray causes me to stop my reading and glance at the metaphoric stars he has cast in the metaphoric sky.

The urgency I cast upon you is that you not be satisfied with the mere recitation of your own language, rather that you look beyond the boundaries it has set for you, looking for words as hoary and wise as the old trout who has resisted being caught all these years.  There are words and phrases and rascally ideas hiding in the fifteenth century prose and ideations of Geoffrey Chaucer, words and phrases and visions that collide within the situations set before us by a remarkable twenty-first century short story writer, Deborah Eisenberg.   Those collisions of word and sound and nuance are the reasons why our stories must never become the literary equivalent of farm-raised fish; they must swim about in the free waters of risk.

Maps to Buried Treasure's Homes

At an earlier time in your reading history, nothing could interest you as much as a treasure map. The merest hint of one had you gripping the pages as though the prize might sneak past you. When such luxuries as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island brought a map directly into the foreground, where you could already visualize the site where the treasure was buried, you were impatient to get on with the digging. This love of treasure maps, buried treasure, and the quest for some cache, hidden away for later use, had less to do with money than with curiosity for what was to come next. Young as you were, you had already learned that treasures, particularly buried ones, were likely to contain surprises, often pleasing ones but just as likely some reminder that what needs to be hidden often contains some artifact which has information you would rather not know.

Treasure maps are thus not content with the role they have been assigned; they have ambitions of becoming a metaphor. just as a comedian nurtures ambitions of portraying such tragedies as Hamlet or Macbeth and the tragedian in turn wishes to portray the comic. Dig here, the map and the metaphor proclaim. Dig far enough down and you will likely discover riches that others before you wanted to preserve beyond discovery. These riches were often ill-gotten, embodying a theoretical if not actual curse on anyone who finds it, said curse being delivered on behalf of those from whom the treasure was wrested.

Treasure stands not only for wealth but power and of course power is the next best thing to knowledge and understanding. With power seductions may be set under way, which often have consequences of betrayal, revenge, and outright deception. With enough treasure, so the logic goes, one can purchase knowledge, even understanding.

Some psychologists and philosophers liken a boy's interest in buried treasure to the growing awareness of sexuality, particularly as exemplified by the ability to achieve and maintain an erection, generally thought to be one of the ingredients necessary to partake of sexual activity. Such theories go some way toward demonstrating how a young boy would see that metaphoric connection as, indeed, many a young girl would arrive at an awareness that she was a metaphoric site of a buried treasure, one she might cheerfully assist some explorer in discovering.

Discovery is the goal of the treasure map; with some particular end in mind, many a searcher for treasure has no further thought of the consequences. Continuing with the sexual metaphor, one consequence of having discovered the buried treasure and, so to speak, unearthed it, is the so-called post-coital sadness the sense of sadness-bordering-on-loneliness after the experience. The sense of having been away from, even separated from one's self for a time. This opens the door to questions about sexual activity as a vacation from reality and/or one's self. Another possible discovery is that with the proper person, there was no post-coital sadness, on the contrary an enhanced sense of participation in something larger.

Even though sex has irrevocably reared its head, butted its way into your life, crashed the party as it were,indeed been a frat-boy catalyst to some of your behavior, it has not removed your fondness for the treasure map nor the discoveries and revelations that might appear when the treasure is located and then opened. The surprise that awaits is for your taste the driving force behind fiction, even the kinds of fiction in which the treasure is either a man or a woman for a male or female protagonist or the reverse.
Discovery awaits us at every turn, discovery that an anticipated thing is unspeakably better than what was anticipated or unspeakably more dreadful than could have possibly been imagined.

Discovery, you see, is like reality; it exists on its own terms, regardless of what you think or feel. You may have been programmed in some way to anticipate a certain consequence from a trail of digging for a particular treasure, but reality has its own notions about whether you should even find it. Discovery belongs in every story. Reality belongs to some extent in every story.

You, in your own way, have chosen to go forth, a step or two up in class from the good Mr. Chaucer's Pardoner, attempting to sell or otherwise barter treasure maps to a segment of the public. You have come a long way in six hundred years, but you still have steps you can take. There is this map burning a hole in your metaphorical pocket.

Dear Instructor, Thank you for letting us see your course proposal

The Wire is a sixty-segment novel-for-television, set in contemporary Baltimore, where it follows the lives and interactions of an ensemble cast. Noted for its gritty, well-written scenes and its characters, all of whom are memorable in their edgy plausibility, it takes on social issues such as drugs, education, corruption, and the politics of survival in such professions as government, law enforcement, working conditions, and journalism. Scarcely a week elapses when you do not think about it in some way, even if it is the unfortunate one in which you wonder if many of the excellent black actors who appeared in it will ever again have such opportunities to display their talents.

You are thinking about it now because you are preparing for a meeting next week in which you are to present a list of courses you believe should be offered as a part of a curriculum for students whose goal it is to become a writer. On that list, you are asked to indicate which you wish to teach (as opposed to courses you would teach if you got stuck with the assignment). You had long ago decided you are no longer interested in teaching courses that do not interest you, thus were you to get stuck teaching a particular course, such as one of those you'd been politically maneuvered into, you would turn the course into something that would excite you to spend time with.

What a splendid course there is in viewing, discussing, examining issues and themes residing within The Wire. Because of its length, you'd either have to break the course down into two parts, The Wire I and The Wire II, that is unless you picked a handful of characters and scenes for examination, as you had already reasoned you would have to do with another course that will appear on your list. That course is one you would call The Canterbury Tales, your introduction relating the Chaucer work to the frame-tale narrative before you moved along to "The Knight's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale," and "Sir Thopas' Tale," ending with the remarkable "The Wife of Bath,"demonstrating the various levels of social position, the relationship between the ranks, and the attitudes of each.

As you are working on this proposal, thoughts of The Wire never far from your mind, you happen to be reading Clockers, the imposing novel by one of the major writers on The Wire, Richard Price. As you write about The Canterbury Tales, you cannot help thinking about the parallel stories of the two majors in Clockers, Strike, a young black drug lieutenant to a drug captain, and Rocco Klein, a homicide investigator, and the way the ensemble casts of Clockers and The Wire are in so many ways counterparts of The Canterbury Tales.

Your reasoning takes you on this particular vector: It would be more a political reality for you to expect to have a course on The Canterbury Tales offered than one on The Wire. Having succeeded, you could use The Canterbury Tales to bring in The Wire for comparison, which is certainly something you'd enjoy doing. But this gives you more than a buzz; it gives you a high. Why not a third course, combining the two? The Academic Senate is a potential reason why. But the thought of it won't go away, each frame-tale explains and explores the other; each is social in the intense, pulsing presence memorable story defines . These are the kinds of connections that come from writing story; this, too, is worth talking about in the class room.

The Alaskan Connection

Every so often, in search of some specific document or record, you uncover a stash of handwritten notes and printed out pages of manuscript that at first seem to be lecture notes for a particular class interspersed with portions of manuscripts from that class.

At first.

Then it is born home on you that you greatly resist giving the same class twice. In fact you could argue with yourself that the dearer the subject is to you, the more likely the notes for the class will have been constructed in a way that sends you off on a different vector than the last time, much like a jazz musician who, even in practice or rehearsal, is not interested in following the same path twice.

And it hits again that the manuscript pages are rarely from students because those will all have been commented on and returned, leaving the hangers on to be from you, written at times gone from your memory, a part of a larger edifice--the place or state you inhabit when working on your own worlds and time frames.

Having just completed "White Sky, Black Ice" by your sudden new interest, Stan Jones, you are aware of one of the significant differences between his work and yours. His novels are set in Alaska, a landscape where weather is of greater consequence than where your work is largely set. To be sure, it rains here, the earth quakes, burns, dries up and there are portions of it where the heat scalds or crackles with inherent lightning. You are not edged by the nature of your stories to make weather so active a participant; there are times in fact when Jones' descriptions of weather make you want your heaviest jacket as well as your sunglasses. You are drawn to Jones' work because of the use he makes of the racial diversity in his landscape, his Native Alaskans easily outnumbering what you would call the Anglos, indeed using a Native as his protagonist.

Jones has caused you to entertain the romantic notion that you could spend some time in a place such as Anchorage, possibly even Nome, simply for the effects of living among a group of individuals who radiate a patina of individuality that is undershot by the humor of the disconnected. It is madness, of course, to think you could live there for any time, thanks to the cold and the relative lack of need for a writer of the sorts of things you write, a teacher for the sorts of things you teach, or an editor for the sorts of material you are retained to edit. It is equally appropriate and wonderful to enjoy so much a writer whose work causes you to suspend disbelief at the thought of a place there, upper.

As you pour through pages from your latest discovery, you notice that you rarely do write about climate conditions, largely because they are so close to 24/7 compatible that they remain shadowy, unimportant in the overall schemata. Your major concerns seem to be individuals whom you could easily define now as Alaskans brought south to the lower States and not particularly happy about it. Your characters seem to have in addition to the agendas they need to succeed on page a kind of cranky response to social conditions closing in on them that cause them to snap and bark at many stimuli without necessarily being querulous or even mean-spirited. It is more a matter of advancing arthritis, too many faculty meetings or their equivalents, too many dog catchers insisting they curb their dog or neuter their cat, too many neighborhood petitions, too many stores such as K-Mart, trying to dictate price, packaging, and shape. Some of them have gone through too many relationships, others not enough; in either case necessary discoveries about the human condition have been given low priority to such thing as individual discovery, making a place in the world, asking the right questions.

Each time you discover such a trove, you take some moments to reacquaint yourself with it before trying to gather it with earlier such finds, if not neat and tidy, at least less scattered about your living and working areas. Some of them have already found their way into print, which makes it seem as though you are not as devoted a creator as you might be, since you can scarcely remember the date or place of publication (and filing some of these in a large notebook produced even more shattering experiences at the discovery of more forgotten publications yet).

The thing is so wide-spread. At your bedside, the new John Banville novel and three new studies of Chaucer, who also reminds you of the Alaskan landscape in the diversity of social and ethical types that you find yourself thinking about that past time, too, yes; I could spend time there. You were thinking of a mischievous way to bring The Miller's Tale into 2010, aware of how well it stands on its own as a story but also how perfect it is in companionship with The Knight's Tale, a perfect follow-up.

You see no way out of it; you will have to live a longtime to get at all this, risking the cranky prospects of arthritis, ill-timed stiffness, suspicions, and the most common trope of all, "I may have told you this before..."

The Yearning Curve

When you are in the beginning stages of learning a particular discipline, there comes an idealized peek into the future, when you visualize yourself in the act of performing that particular activity, flawlessly, effortlessly, as though you had been intended from birth to arrive at that state. This peek into the future is in the way of a gift to yourself, an incentive for learning so well that you have invited the discipline into permanent remedy within your being. Some of the disciplines, such as the grammar and syntax of the English language, are basic. Others, such as sexual performance, are primal. Yet others, such as operating a vehicle, required that you be licensed.

Some things, such as sex and voting, can be engaged without much advance preparation, although in each case, advanced preparation is ultimately to your advantage.

Some stages of learning involve the awareness of tools and the understanding of their use. Before you were forced by circumstances to trade in your hip joints for those of a titanium design, you were much concerned with the nature of running shoes and a study of stride and lift and, of course, the mechanics of hydration. The night before a half- or full-marathon was a splendid opportunity to show your awareness of nutritional and metabolic processes as well as your own pleasure in preparing a meal of pasta and lobster for their carbs and glycogen. You now consider instead of running shoes the mechanics of swim fins and such stylistic devices as Total-Immersion swimming.

As the need and opportunities to become a book editor approached you, there were tools mentioned in revered tones, beginning with CMOS, The Chicago Manual of Style, which you have owned since your first purchase when it had a green color, not quite that of lime Jell-o. There was also the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Biographical Dictionary, the Atlantic Monthly Short Lives, a Merriam-Webster Geographical Dictionary, a world atlas. You used some of these items more than others. When you had the seniority to do so, you implemented changes such as substituting The American Heritage unabridged for the MW, at which point one individual you knew and respected congratulated you on coming of age to the point of choosing the standards for your publishing venture. (Emboldened by this vote of confidence, you promptly instructed the copyeditors in your employ NOT to hyphenate Moby-Dick.)

Many of the books-as-tools you grew forward with have tumbled off the desk and into obsolescence as entire technologies have changed. Does it date you beyond measure to speak of a favored guide, Words into Type, which still has a pretty effective section on the author's responsibility to a manuscript and a project? You don't have to answer that, but you do have to know what being a professional entails.

At one time you thought to assemble a style guide for fiction writers, still not a bad idea because, splendid as it is, CMOS is more for the nonfiction writer. In your way, the work you now have out in submission, The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit, is, as the title suggests, a tool, a reference guide for the fiction writer. You are inordinately fond of the publisher who is now looking at it, but even were they after deliberation to decline, the work helped you and was at the point of this essay, your tool kit for story-telling and for the construction of non-formulaic fictions.

These thoughts have come tumbling down on you precisely because you set out this morning to restore some order to the shelves closest to your working area. Which tools can you live without? Which are you likely to use again and again? And one of the most intriguing mysteries of all: There is no question about the place Mark Twain occupies in your esteem and your dreams. You've carefully set out an entire bookcase devoted to him and such books about him as you care to keep. The mystery that arises has its origins in the second tier of the bookshelf closest at hand to you, where CMOS resides with Words into Type, The Copyeditor's Handbook, A Dictionary of American-English Usage, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and other such compilations, right next to a pile of Big Little Books used as a sort of decorative bookend, is Chaucer A to Z, The Viking Portable Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, John Gardner's The Life and Times of Chaucer, and yet another volume of The Canterbury Tales before drifting off to a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? You would hardly call yourself a mediaevalist or even a Middle Ages man. Could it be that you see in Chaucer the human condition writ large as a writer's tool kit? It could be.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

In recent days you have been toying with historical times in which it might have been better for you to flourish as a writer, the only boundary being that whatever the time you chose, it must have been at least a year before you were born, and could extend as far back in time as you wished.

Although a fun game in terms of causing an immediate and painful awareness of the gaps in your historical perspective, the exercises also demonstrated a kind of ethical lapse in that you could then be guilty of changing the rules of the game while the game was in progress or, to use a metaphor you've come to dislike, tilting the playing field to afford you some advantage.

Given the opportunities you've had to hang out with a wide spectrum of writers, you'd probably have fallen in with a similar sampling, men and women who know the difference between a Shirley Temple and a double whatever, one cube only, please; as well with men and women who knew how to take a swipe at things they detested and in perhaps the same breath extend a helping hand.

It comes down to:  There is never a bad time to be a writer, never was.  It has always been a precarious form of living, filled with other jobs (Samuel Richardson, for example, was a printer, Geoffrey Chaucer was a kind of Rahm Emanuel for John of Gaunt) or responsibilities, sometimes coming as an accident.  Sarah Orne Jewett, on the other hand, was at it in her teens, although it didn't hurt that her father was a doctor and that she, as one of the sayings goes, came from good people.

It can get you tortured, killed, disappeared, divorced, reviled, laughed at.  In some ways it is like that most painful aspect of herpes known as herpes zoster or shingles, resident within you and dormant until it has a mind to come forth in full fury, inflicting itself upon you.  Some individuals drink to bring it on, others to shut off the sense it gives of someone having rented out your entire being to another tenant while you were at work somewhere, innocently making a fortune and a life for yourself.

You remember John Sanford, limping down the stairs to the Von's Pharmacy in Montecito in quest of Advil to ease the pain in his hip.  When you suggested hip replacement surgery, which you knew from first hand experience was an outstanding success, he complained that he was too old for such frippery, but not long after taunted you with the fact that he, at age ninety-three, had just signed a three-book contract and wondered when you had ever had a three-book contract, this old buddy of Nathaniel West who was so pleased with himself at having become a lawyer and passing the New York Bar Exam first shot through before he ran into West, who told him he was working on a novel.  Imagine having to get all the way through law school before discovering that you were not a lawyer but rather a writer instead.

Imagine Henry Roth, sixty years between novels, Call It Sleep, then sixty years of futzing around, teaching Latin, raising ducks before Mercy of a Rude Stream came forth.  Imagine him living in a delapidated apartment building on Fourth Street in Albuquerque before your old pal, Digby Wolfe, who taught drama at the University there,found him and arranged for an award.  When Digby tried to help him up on the stage, he said, What, you don't think I can walk?

Never a bad time to be one, but the price is that you can't imitate or copy or merely reproduce what you see, you've got to put some music and some imp of the perverse and, to completely muck up the metaphor, let the genie out of the bottle and spill over the pages, otherwise you might as well teach Latin or deliver newspapers if there are any left to deliver, or raise ducks.  Ishiguro has gotten you thinking about this last aspect of it in his short story, "Cellists," where someone is waiting for the right circumstances to manifest, already a bit nervous because age 42 is up and in place and this particular cellist has not played all that many notes because of not wanting to give the inner cellist bad habits.

It is all around you, this time, this place.  The hills may be alive with the sound of music but they are also alive with the sound of publishers cutting back, of agents letting clients go, of magazines dropping off the radar, and always of someone either in your family or writing group or some dumb writing magazine reminding you of Samuel Johnson's apothegem that only a fool writes for no money.  Little late, but go tell G.M. Hopkins that.

Gut Feelings: Intuition or Heartburn?

romanticism--male and female writers, male and female characters acting out their enthusiasm; a dramatic, personal attitude reflecting a passionate interest in and curiosity about travel, science, history, animals, behavior in general, art, food, drink, literature, all terrains of the imagination; an overwhelming belief in the potential inherent in humanity; an instinctive and vigorous distrust of philosophies or systems that diminish or remove altogether the sense of individual choice based on individual responsibility.

Although romanticism and romance have a brief arc of overlap, the two concepts, particularly in the literary sense, go their separate ways. The romantic is the Quixote-like character but equally the Tom Jones or Becky Sharp or Asher Lev character, off in the world to seek some form of fortune. The romantic is often forced to squint at the accouterments of reality because of the dazzle of reflected light from the goal or ideal. 

 A scholarly debate of some vigor argues the likelihood of Geoffrey Chaucer having worked at translation of a medieval French poem, The Romance of the Rose, which involved such romantic tropes as dream visions and the true identity of the protagonist Rose, as in, was she a real person or a metaphor for all women? The scholarly debate adds yet another note of romanticism to the persona of Chaucer, who also may or may not have been a spy, may or may not have been involved in a court case where he was charged with rape. Ah, the possibilities.

Romance is more an extended and complex display of a wedding cake, complete with bride and groom effigies at the top tier. Will a particular couple stop fighting long enough to get married? Will Beatrice and Benedick find true happiness? Will the Wife of Bath finally settle into a good relationship with a man, and is her current husband, Jenkyn, Mr. Right? As readers, we already know we feel pretty sure about Jane, so much so that we cannot help wonder if Rochester is going to make her happy. And as we nervously reread the final paragraphs of the ur-romance, Rebecca, can we be absolutely sure that the nameless narrator is going to be okay with Mr. Right?

Both romanticism and romance are considerable forces for a writer to deal with. After rereading The Crystal Cave by Mary Renault, we are tempted to observe that romanticism (as well as the English language) is alive and well, thank you. Even though Candice Bushnell exudes a tangy modernity and edge, any of her novels assures us romance--at least in her hands--has not gone vegan on us.

Romanticism recognizes the nine-to-five job but argues in favor of the intuitive, aggressively emotional state over the more formal, rational, mechanical. Thus does romanticism become alchemy as it helps transmute the perfervid scientist into Dr. Frankenstein, who may have slightly overreached. Thus does romanticism bring drama into the equation by matching Dr. Jekyll against the neo-Russeauian Mr. Hyde. 

 Indeed, isn't Natty Bumpo the Russeauian noble savage, gone around the bend. Not to forget John Yossarian nor, for that matter, Tom Joad. Romanticism gives the writer a sterling opportunity to take on established order, one of the most splendid examples of all inherent in lead character and writer in Huckleberry Finn, the former taking on social caste and civilization, warts and all; the latter taking on the excesses of Sir Walter Scott (whom he came to loathe), slavery, and race relations in the U.S.

Framed

frame-tale format--a narrative or series of separate stories built about an incident, an historical moment, or theme; a single or multiple narrative constructed with recognition of an earlier work; a staging or formulating device for the presentation of a group of stories within a single story. Thus Tales of Scheherazade, or The Thousand and One Nights, a series of stories told by a young woman to a misanthropic Persian king who had the habit of marrying a new wife every day while beheading yesterday's candidate. Thus also The Decameron, in which a group of young nobles, moved to the country to escape the ravages of The Black Death plague, told stories to amuse themselves. From his awareness of these and other frame tales comes Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, stories of individuals on a religious pilgrimage. Off in another part of the world comes the frame tale of the so-called Rashomon Stories, where a single event is replayed to reflect the point of view of the participants, illustrating, as Chaucer did in The Canterbury Tales, a significant view of the human condition from various vantage points on the social scale, a view which has remained constant over the Milena.

In more modern times, the frame tale has become ubiquitous; it appears in such forms as James Joyce's Ulysses, studiously framed on The Odyssey, Clint McCown's short story collection, The Member-Guest, dealing with a weekend golf tournament in a down-at-the-heels country club in the Midwest; and Pam Huston's achingly hilarious collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which is a variation on the theme of women being drawn to men who are more drawn to a particular lifestyle than to a particular relationship. Not to forget the memorable cattle-drive theme of the motion picture Red River, which was framed on the seagoing Mutiny on the Bounty, and showing yet another variation on The Odyssey with the Coen Brothers' film, Brother, Where Art Thou? Katherine Ann Porter's 1962 novel, The Ship of Fools, is framed on a 1494 narrative The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant; links of Porter's novel could also be argued to link to Hieronymous Bosch's painting, The Ship of Fools, which Bosch admitted to have come from the Brant narrative. It is a likely and lively comparison to argue the connection between Porter's Ship of Fools and The Decameron and certainly The Canterbury Tales.

The frame-tale format adds another layer of thematic connective tissue between the newer version and the original, the two versions becoming linked in the reader's mind--if the reader is aware of the source. This observation leads to the further observation that the more recent version of a framed tale must stand on its own dramatic merits, as though the reader had no previous knowledge of the original. The motion picture, Shakespeare in Love, had a richer level of significance for those familiar with Twelfth Night and the conditions of the English theater in which the roles of women characters were performed by young boys. Thus the reader familiar with Shakespeare would know that the character of Viola in Twelfth Night was performed by a boy, leading to the conceit in Shakespeare in Love of a young woman masquerading as a boy in order to win the role of a woman in a play, "causing" Shakespeare to "see" the inspiration for Twelfth Night. The play within a play or the story within a story has to stand on its own, to appeal to and transform an audience. The product of the framed tale cannot rely on the fact of its point of origin. Ulysses had to stand on its own, a reputation disputed by many critics and readers.

The doors of imagination fly open to admit possibe entrants for future frame-tale circumstances. What thoughts were dancing in the mind of Ray Bradbury when he got down to work positing the concept of a tattooed man in a circus, a tattooed man whose very tattoos came to life, each demanding its own story? What thoughts later danced in the mind of Mario Vargas Llosa, whose Aunt Julia and the Script Writer becomes another excellent example of exciting ways to tell stories within a larger story?

Let's Hear It for the Old Couple

Thinking about Chaucer in the twenty-first century is for me more than an act of keeping alive within me a respect for a man and his works long, long dead but as well of an awareness that the reading of him revealed itself to me. I speak of the relationship between the teller and the tale, a relationship that can influence the manner in which both teller and tale are recalled long after the reading is done.

I speak admiringly of The Pardoner's Tale, which in its dark, Chaucerian way, snaps me six hundred years away, into episodes of The Wire. The Pardoner's Tale is not for everyone, indeed not for the pilgrims for whom it is intended. When the eponymous narrator begins his prologue at the urging of the host, Harry Bayley, his fellow pilgrims don't want to hear it, because of the ambiguous nature of the man:
A voice he had as small as hath a goat.
No beard had he, nor ever one should have.
As smooth it was as it were new y-shave;
I trow he were a gelding or a mare...

which is to say, his sexuality is certainly called into account and in addition because of his profession of selling religious relics of doubtful provenance and effect. The Pardoner is a fraud in many ways although to his credit, he is forthcoming to a high degree, undercutting our own tendency to regard him with the same disdain shown by his fellow travelers. At first he demonstrates for them the sales pitch he uses on prospective customers, but then, after a moment of reflection, he acknowledges that he has just given forth nothing but cynical insincerity his , further confessing "myn entente is nat but for to wynne,/ And nothynge for correccioun of synne" (My intent is merely to win [make money], and not at all for the correction of sin). Hearing his confession, offered without apology and under no duress, aren't our feelings for him more complex and positive?

Now on to that splendid Wife of Bath. Her prologue, like The Pardoner's, is a partial confession/revelation, partly a defense. Her curriculum vitae includes having had five husbands, which gives her leave to speak of the "wo that is marriage."

A good WIF was ther OF biside BATHE,
But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe.
Of clooth makyng she hadde swich an haunt,
She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt.
In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon
That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon;
And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she
That she was out of alle charitee.
Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground.
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.
Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.
She was a worthy womman al hir lyve.
Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve,
Withouten oother compaignye in youthe--
But therof nedeth nat to speke as nowthe.

Ah, look at the game old gal, in charge and bigger than life from the very get-go. My personal preference is for the Prologue to her tale, rather than the tale she tells of the court of King Arthur which, although revelatory of a side of her character, seems less exuberant and dimensional than the Prologue. I love it when she rips the equivalent of a girlie magazine from the hands of her present husband and instructs him to admire her--and he does. Or so she says. With all that dynamism and self-assurance she displays, there is just the right touch of ambiguity about her to make us wonder and remember.

These two characters, holding fast to our imaginations over the years represent ways to build characters we can regard as timeless and timelessly human, filled with foible, self-interest, and yet guided by a moral compass where the needle rests not on magnetic north but on the place in the psyche where the truth of self-knowledge dwells.

Unreliable Narrator, Unreliable Reader

In keeping with recent thoughts about the writer's need to tell stories for his or her own sense of identity comes the writer's tidal need to read the works of others, hopeful of clues leading to discoveries of identity, technique, information.

As a teacher I can't help noticing the comparison between the well-read student and the well-read student's probing, original output on the positive side, the comparison between the poorly read student and the derivative, approval-seeking output on the negative side.

It is a personal help to have had since 2005 a weekly commitment to deliver a book review once a week. This has added a cyclic pattern to my reading of alternating newly published works with golden oldies, things I discover new from the new releases listed in Publishers' Weekly, and things I wish I'd had the opportunity to review when they were new (and possibly had). 

 This pattern does not by the way ratify any sense I have of being well read, it merely provides an obligation to read, think, react, and write. Reading in general, reviewing at the pleasure and whim of various book review editors, and being paid to write about things I would ordinarily have purchased remains one of the most satisfying of pursuits. The process also reminds me of how idiosyncratic I am, authors are in general, and readers in great specificity are. Coming into the classroom filled with wannabe writers, bursting at the seams with this attitude about reading and reviewing, is only one of my agendas or, if you will, subtexts. Another is attempting to lure the student away from the desire to seek approval, leading them instead toward the temptation of becoming idiosyncratic--at least as idiosyncratic as I am, possibly even more so.

Two characters I so enjoy talking about (in my idiosyncrasy) are individuals that cause eyebrows to raise, sighs of impatience to emerge, warning flares to arc across the sky that I should give serious thought to moving over to the English Department or consider taking early retirement, those among the more charitable responses. What possible connection could connect present day narrative with two such ancient and outmoded sorts as The Pardoner and The Wife of Bath?

For one thing, each is a splendid example of an unreliable narrator, but their value does not stop with their unreliability or ambiguity. Indeed their value as what I will call vital enigmas is enhanced by the fact that each tells a large measure of what may be seen six hundred years later as no less truthful observations about human nature, each is lured into story telling by the host of a saloon, a man who is, early on in his narrative and of all the pilgrims in the journey to Canterbury, stopped from finishing his tale because "[t]hy draste rhyming is not worth a toord/" and the author himself probably had an agenda relative to a mid-fourteenth century group known as The Lollards, a reformative group reminiscent of some of our contemporary evangelicals. Thus did Chaucer bring forth an agenda against a group whose name was thought, among other things, to mean Mumblers. The Wife of Bath was--my take--a swipe at the old boys in the locker room, a woman of stature who has held up pretty well, thank you.

To move forth with a mountain goat leap, What are we to make of text we read, admire, and absorb as resonating within us? What are we to make of statements coming forth from characters who seem disorganized, corrupt, caught up in agenda, and yet redolent of the Truth as we see it? Further, what are we to make of our own narratives?

Ah, you've noticed: it is a tricky, duplicitous world out there. Individuals from half way around the world are busy trying to give us millions of dollars from the estate of wealthy Nigerians, all of whom perished in some airline disaster. Individuals closer to us are trying to convince us that John McCain has our better interests at heart, and Joe Lieberman is trying to convince us it is all Kosher, all of it.

Mountain goat alighting. None of it is Kosher nor reliable, or more than relatively truthful. We have some measure of science which has undergone peer review and vetting and is as reliable as far as we have progressed in our--dare I say it--evolution, but it is just as possible to regress, to stall, to reject inquiry and questing and questioning.

So why did BO roll on FISA? Why did the Dems roll on the Fourth Amendment? Who will come knocking on our in boxes, asking for donations tomorrow, after selling out the Glorious Fourth? And who among us will be so unreliable as to forget once again what they've done to us and how we let them?

Unreliable narrators.
Unreliable readers.

Quo vadimus?

Comfort Poetry

When the world is too much with us, as Wordsworth viewed it, late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...
and so we turn, much as he did when looking out at a particular field, for a vision of comfort. And so, past comments about comfort food and comfort reading still in my mind, I turn to another of the enduring comforts available to us, comfort poetry, where often the Wordsworth sonnet bubbles up to the top and begins to set things aright.

Begins. You are too absorbed in material things, he seems to be saying, and missing out on the intensity of nature.

What helps the inertia of moving forward is some time spent with Houseman. Terrence, this is stupid stuff. Houseman has long been a cherished comfort, a companion of the road.

Yeats, for the sheer madness of invention and antic, lyric exuberance, breaking over the horizon like a schizoid skyrocket. I went out to the fabled wood because a fire was in my head.

And what comfort in e.e. cummings Damn everything but the circus!

Can your need for comfort fail to be moved by Hopkins?
Glory be to God for dappled things
For skies of couple-color as a brindled cow
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim

And of course more Hopkins yet:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
It will flame out like shining from shook foil...

The Eve of St Agnes fpr cpmfort and Cavafy and Anne Sexton and mad, maddening Pound:

Winter is icummen in
Lhude sing goddamn
Winter is icummen in,
What an augue hath my ham.
Skiddeth bus
And sloppeth us,
Sing damn goddamn.

And the argumentative Pound in:
Hang it all, Robert Browning,
There can be but one Sordello...

And the first eighteen of you know what by you know who:
Whan that Aprille with her shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which virtu engendred is the flour...

Comfort, all of it, all of them, and the world is again fecund with the possibility of you...

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.

Power Outtage

Toward the end of a well-argued blog-cum-essay, Ben Huff touched on a point with relevance to the photographer and the photographed, the taker and, if you will, the taken. It is, as Ben cogently argues, about power.

This same chemistry often takes place on the stage and on the page; effective writers recognize it, wannabe writers had better recognize it. Shooting for quick recognition before moving along, I am tempted to hold forth one of my favorite of all characters from one of my favorite of all authors, Ms. Wife of Bath, from The Canterbury Tales. Reminding me of Zoe Strauss with her ebullient humanism, Ms. Wife stands out in a time when women were happy enough to be seen, but were not heard with too much enthusiasm. One moment particularly comes to mind, when Jankin, her latest in a series of husbands, is reading the then equivalent of a girlie magazine and Ms. Wife tears the page out of the booklet and tells him to get with the program, which happens to be her.

Shakesperean examples of scenes with shifting power bases abound, not the least among them involving Hamlet, his mother, and the ghost of his father/her husband, all together in her bed chamber. Hamlet, about to kill King Claudius, is another. "Now might I do it..." except that Claudius is saying his prayers. Come to think of it, Macbeth is about to pull a Tony Soprano on King Malcolm, but loses his resolve when he sees a servant carrying a dinner tray to Malcolm's suite, causing Macbeth to think Last Supper kinds of thoughts. "Trumpet-tongued angels will sing his praises." And a lovely tidal arrangement of power, starting with Macbeth telling Lady Macbeth that he can't go through with it. She is disgusted with his spinelessness--power shifts to her. But look what happens when Macbeth screws up his courage and goes through with the murder of Malcolm. Returning to their apartment, his clothing spattered with Malcolm's blood, his hands a gory smear, Lady Macbeth greets him with an effusive: "My husband!" Power back to Micky B.

Moving into modern drama and storytelling, say, just for the hell of it, Joe Orton's noirish Entertaining Mr. Sloan, or the splendid Jim Harrison novel, A Return to Earth, we see men and women on the stage and on the page, in varying degrees of vulnerability, in varying circumstances where they have given up power, usurped power from others, or had power wrested from them. Whether we take their image furtively or with their full consent, we are engaged in a dance of power with our subjects, with our characters, with our viewers, with our readers.

Ben Huff, in addition to producing moving, memorable images, has taken one of his recent shots, Red Door Open, which I greatly admire, and opened a door for me which I must enter, getting my own take on the matter of power. I believe the way to interest an audience in a character is to show that character in some vulnerability, being in the debt of a person, place, deadline, or attitude. Possibly also some disability. The story is about that person trying to get some power, either back in possession or, in the case of the buildugsroman, to get power for the first time and to use it for growth and understanding. This is where story begins. Where I believe I fit into the equation--thanks, Ben--is to give that character, that her or him, power. Over me.