Funny you should ask

Humor is burlesque and parody without props. Although there may be physicality to inform it, humor is comedy without the banana peel or the cream pie. In comedy, character types are sufficient enough conditions; in humor, articulated individuals, preferably pompous ones, are a necessary condition, but when all is said and done, anyone with pretensions will do quite nicely, thank you.

A man slipping on a banana peel is comedic, particularly if the slip comes as a surprise. A man who sees the banana peel, pointedly steps around it, then in doing so stumbles from the curb is an occasion of humor. We laugh at the misfortune of both those who slip, grateful it was not us who was the victim, but our laughter is a degree more intense and deeper when we are laughing at the person who seems the slightest bit self-congratulatory at having avoided the lurking peel, only to stumble a beat or two on down the line.

We laugh because of our awareness that it's a jungle out there, where ever there happens to be. We laugh at the sad awareness that there is no rock bottom, rather there is always potential for a far-better worse than any we could have imagined. Humor demands--and always gets--the last laugh, and were you to persist in graphing out its parabola, you would discover that the joke is always on you.

In its way, humor is as blind as justice: it has no specific issue with any of us, is perfectly neutral in assessing blame. Humor's end is not the vendetta of the last laugh, but instead to remind us that we have been chosen for special notice because we are human. We are the only species of whom this is true. In recognition of this fact, we sometimes try to dress up, costume, or otherwise adorn our pets, particularly but not limited to dogs and cats. When this activity does not produce enough of a desired degree of laughter, we are eventually presented with the sad awareness that in descending order, humor and the pet in question have had the last laugh because, however we rationalize our behavior of costuming or tricking or training or teasing, the pet is only afflicted temporarily. We may have momentarily humiliated Fido or Miss Kitty, but someone or something will remind us of our perfidy of behavior. The pet retains its dignity and we recognize our own inner Iago.

Perhaps the most volatile and damaging weapon of all, humor has the ability to topple individuals, attitudes, institutions, traditions, and behavior patterns. Being yelled at, shouted at, outwitted, or repressed are conditions we are used to experiencing; we can find ways of coping with these, even to the point of rationalizing ways in which we emerged waving the bloody scalp of revenge, but there is little relief from being laughed at as a result of having been caught out in hypocrisy or approaching the moral high ground as though we were Arthur, drawing Excalibur from the stone.

The Bucking Bronco of Character

It takes one or more characters, interacting within a scene, to provide the energy and movement of the story.

Easily enough to say; to bring it off, you need to have an attitude toward a character before you can set the individual participants into the landscape of scene with any hope that they will take the bait and accordingly move from mere conversation or observation into the swampy terrain of story. Even more difficult to contemplate is the need for these individual characters to be associated with some subtext. Under those circumstances, what appears to be mere conversation or observation is spoken or observed in relation to some other circumstantial reality.

Attitude toward characters is essential if this subtext is to take effect. Harold Pinter is a writer who often uses this approach to his scenes. Two characters appear to be going through their usual routines, talking about nothing of particular note, yet there is a hovering tension that alerts us to a dynamic between the characters, a resident relationship that combines the need most individuals have to categorize social station and group relations.

The attitude the writer brings to characters may be as seemingly neutral as curiosity or as biased as antipathy. In either case, the writer becomes a participant rather than a mere commentator who, like attendees at political rallies, carry placards announcing their feelings. The writer must ride the horse of attitude but be willing to be bucked off in the process. We must not allow our attitudes to become the equivalent of an expert rider, using riding skills to hold on. To put it more bluntly, we must not allow our original regard for the character, whether it is admiration or distaste, to become the rider struggling to remain on the horse. If we are not careful, we will remain on the horse and the character will not have an opportunity to change: The good guy will continue to do admirable things and attract attention because of his goodness, the bad guy will ride the bronco of despicable behavior right back into the corral, as bad at the end as he was in the beginning.

It is difficult bordering on impossible to be convincing in the short span of a short story when it comes to demonstrating change within a character, but we can approximate the human condition we hope to unleash within characters by allowing the good guys to screw up and the bad guys to do something remarkably empathetic. Novels afford us a bit more latitude: We can allow a few characters the luxury of change in a longer work. These observations are not engraved on any stone plates as laws or commandments, rather they reflect technical considerations. The thing we need to encourage is the capacity inherent in a character to be pulled off course in a deed, observation, or tug of curiosity. If they can break free from the preconceived notion of them, however briefly--just to the point of alarming the writer--they will be observing the potential to do the very thing that makes everyone a winner, and that very thing is to cause surprise.

Pigeons, Pigeons, in Holding Patterns

You think the air traffic at O'Hare is scary, at LAX is beyond belief, at JFK is an impossible jumble.

You think that and you're undoubtedly correct. It is, after all, waning months of 2007, crowding in on, gulp, 2008. More things up in the air, more persons in flight. More purpose. This is not to gloss over the agendas of Neanderthals and Cro-magnons, bursting out of the Ice Age. They had just as severe a case for survival as we. We, at least, have MacBooks and North Face jackets, and sensible shoes. But as you trudge forth each day to where your car is parked, you cannot help but notice the warning signs.

Pigeon poop.

There are multifarious reasons, not the least of which is that our survival causes more pigeons to be up in the air, in holding patterns, waiting, oh waiting for clearance to come home and roost.

I have it on good if not impeccable authority that a professional juggler can only keep eleven objects in the air at one time. Try to get a twelfth dish or ball or whatever else the juggler fancies and you are doomed to be up to your rear end in broken pottery. I believe there is no limit to the number of pigeons you can have circling above you, waiting to come home to roost, their poop on the bonnet of your auto being one evidence of their holding pattern.

One such pigeon wanting to land is a November 9-11 pigeon, a weekend intensive workshop on point-of-view for writers. This will require a syllabus, if I am to go forth prepared, showing examples of the various points of view; the vision is not unlike Talmud in which voices of authority argue, sometimes across generations, their interpretations of the thing we see before us and which we agree to call The Human Condition. It is a syllabus I will prepare because I can't not do so; it is a way I have of setting things forth in much the same way it is Ishmael's way of signing on a ship when he is overcome with melancholia. I sometimes wish I had melancholia rather than the need to set things forth because melancholia is a tidal thing that can ebb and flow under the influences of love or enthusiasm or change of scenery, while the need to set things forth is merely a need to set things forth. Ishmael has his oceanic, tidal flow; I have the constant sound of fluttering wings circling above.

We will see Nick Caraway arguing on behalf of Jay Gatz, aka Gatsby. We will know about Huck Finn in the unlikely event that we have not read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and we will certainly agree to call Ishmael whatever he asks us to call him.
We should also consider the Talmudic litany in Madam Bovary, a veritable tsunami of points of view.

We must consider also our own work, the raucous multitudes of clangorous harmony, circling within our imagination, waiting to be noticed, named, set forth on note paper, transferred to screen, processed, and printed. Points of view, all of them, wanting to be heard, wanting to be believed, genies in a bottle, wanting to be freed from their confinement and let loose in the early November air, where they will do their best to convince us of the absolute correctness of their position, of the Platonic ideal of their vision, of the Socratic force of their logic.

Connections, Hyperlinks, and Neural Pathways in the Forest

After two unsuccessful efforts to plow through what I considered a bog of style and plot, I was able finally to get through Richard Powers' stunning, provocative novel, The Gold Bug Variations, my curiosity driven forward by the outrageous pun in the title, and its protagonist's goal of cracking the most secret of all codes, the genetic code.

I was glad to succeeded because it honed my appetite for Powers' most recent novel, The Echo Maker, a challenge and a pleasure to read, an even greater challenge and pleasure to review. (See the review here, if you're interested.)

Always one to probe deeply into the permutations of what it means and what it feels like to be alive, Powers this time has delved into the very basis of our individual and collective awareness, The Self, arranging a set of circumstances that allow us to, as Robert Burns put it, "see ourselves as others see us." Powers as well exploits that bedrock of individuality, that I-ness of consciousness, starting with a young protagonist who is injured in an accident, placed in an induced coma against the possibility of his brain becoming fevered, then observed. The protagonist exhibits the Capgras Syndrome in which the victim tends to suspect that those closest to him, friends, and family, are impostors. Okay, here we go. What is the self? What are the rules for defining the definition? And after a few chapters, even physician, heal thyself.

My enthusiasm for the novel--which won The National Book Award, led me to overstep lines; I foisted copies of the book on any number of friends, including a man who has spent a few weeks here and there over the years on The New York Times best-seller list, J. A. "Jerry" Freedman.

Cut to the past Saturday when Jerry arrived at break time during my Saturday writers' workshop to leave off a copy of the latest Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, in which he has a story, and to return a loaned copy of The Echo Maker. "You win," Jerry said. "Only a writer with chops like his could bring this off and be convincing about it. I don't like to use the word genius, but what else are you going to call him? I'm off to order all his other books."

Jerry goes after writers the way the late jazz great, Roy Eldridge, went around looking for trumpet players, to play with and against. In short, Jerry had been in a cutting contest with Richard Powers and was wanting more.

Okay, so on the window sill directly over my Tempur-Pedic pillow and what passes for a bed below it is--you guessed it, a stack of Powers' other books. When we are not completely self-absorbed into our own work, we're hungry for experiences that take us into the literary equivalent of trading eights, going with and against writers whose craft and reach argue us up to a performance we can live with for a time.

Some years back, I fell under the wheels of another writer, Muriel Spark, a remarkable talent who produced provocative work right up to her recent death. She left wheel marks on my writer's psyche from the get-go, but of her extensive work, Memento Mori stands as the most insightful and daring. Spark is quite a bit more metaphoric than Powers; in The Mandlebaum Gate, for instance, she uses that very gate which divides the city of Jerusalem into two areas as a symbol for the soul, and in arguably her most popular, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she uses an ensemble cast of characters to represent various Jungian archetypes.

This is not to say Powers uses no metaphor or, indeed, irony as Spark does; but when he puts a slide under the microscope, he names the organism.

As The Echo Maker investigates the constituent parts of Self, Memento Mori investigates the responses of Self to the ever-present aspect of death, hovering over the lightning-in-a-bottle we call life. As the novel begins, a group of elderly friends begin receiving phone calls in which the caller admonishes, "Remember, you must die." Some of them have called the police, who join in on attempts to identify the caller. Thus does Spark do what Powers has more recently done, turn the narrative into a classic mystery, which is always a mystery of identity. Each novel, presented as a mystery, draws the reader's attention away from the greater issue at stake. Each writer is skillful enough that the attention cannot help but be led back to uncomfortable questions that splatter like insects on the windshield of awareness. Who are we? What steps have we taken to discover answers? What steps are we taking to avoid inevitabilities?

Spark, recently dead at eighty-eight, and Powers, still as unrelenting in his stalking of our sensitivities as the ghost of Hamlet's father, provide artistic renditions of our condition, guidelines for examination and for those two great dramatic rewards, surprise and discovery.

Very much in the current flickering of the public eye are the realities of Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow. Already the schoolyard bullies have begun to circle around each, wanting not only to get a ringside seat at the fight but to shout opinions, suggestions of strategy. As the wry and insightful political cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, has pointed out, the Final Four have nothing to do with UCLA, Ohio State, Georgetown, and defending champion Florida (Go, Bruins!). His Final Four are Dick Cheney, the kid, Al Gonzalez, and The Iraqi War. My own candidates are Cancer, the Environment, Extremism, and Health Care.

Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow have been handed the challenges of awareness of a more-or-less finite time. Each has some time left to do or not. So far, Elizabeth has spoken forth. For all I disagree with Tony Snow's politics, I suspect his choice will be to engage.

I speak of these public figures from the bleachers, but nevertheless with a valid ticket of entry. I'm just about a week short of my forty-month anniversary from the surgery that removed what was rated a IIIa tumor. From this perspective, the numbers look good, but numbers only reflect trends. You can live on trends, but they don't stop reality from kicking in, if reality were of a mind.

More so than any other species, we humans seem to have been hard wired for the tendency to self-pity. We also have choices. The greatest gift is the choice to engage in the work, whatever that work is. If we are lucky, we will never get all our work done, there will always be too much of it. The other choice is to opt for no work and for self-pity, which is a ticket to another set of bleachers in another stadium, where the game is always rained out and the hot dogs have lost their taste.

Muriel Spark. Richard Powers. Read the instructions.