Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer IX

Your enthusiasm for a project in the works rather than plot or outline is the hybrid vehicle you will ride through to the final destination.  The main source of power for this hybrid vehicle is your enthusiasm, but when that switches off or its warning lights begin to flicker, your next remarkable fuel is curiosity.  Thus my advice to you:  Beware of Sisyphean sentences in the course of which you push stolid predicates to the top of a rhetorical hill, give them a shove, then hope they achieve in their downward descent some--you guessed it--momentum.  Remember Sisyphus as a metaphor representing meaningless, mind-numbing work; keep him in mind as an exemplar of the kind of sentence you do not wish to write, not under any circumstances.

Sisyphus was sentenced to an eternity of meaningless work for defying the god Zeus--well, actually, for hitting on a mortal woman Zeus had planned an adventure or two with.  If your sentences bear the aura of fearful duty--"I've got to explain my characters' motivation"--or the taint of relying on the need to satisfy everyone in your writing group, including that one person who is so particularly critical of everything you write, these burdens will weigh your sentences and, indeed, your story, bringing it to a standstill, leaving you with the uncomfortable awareness of being alone, stranded as it were on a desert island much as the young chaps in Lord of the Flies were stranded.  And you know what happened to them.

How, I hear you asking, do I achieve this mind-freeing enthusiasm of which I speak?  I can give you the mechanism.  The specifics work for me; perhaps they'll show you how to draw upon them to develop your own, as indeed I drew from my role model, a musician name of Franz Josef Haydn, not only an articulate composer but a prolific one.  He began his working day by sorting through his library of musical scores, finding a piano work written by Karl Philip Emanuel Bach, then spending half an hour playing the score on his own piano, whereupon he turned to his own composing.  Although a fan of Haydn, particularly his piano sonatas, I am not so much a fan of KPE Bach, whose music doesn't send me off the way Haydn's does, but to be sure, Haydn's approach gets me looking.  Look for ten things you can read, recite, listen to, taste, or merely look at.  These are to be selected with the notion that they will provide energy and momentum to you because they have in the past.  I can pretty much get going on nearly anything by Maurice Ravel.  Yo-Yo Ma's renditions of the six unaccompanied cello suites by KPE's father, Johann Sebastian Bach, get me moving.  I find it difficult not to be energized by the playing of nearly anything by Bill Evans going it alone, or accompanied by the wise, verbal bass playing of Eddie Gomez.  Reading Louise Erdrich gets me moving; reading almost anything by Jim Harrison can get the ideas hopping.

It rarely takes me more than three or four things to get me going.  Sometimes I am drawn back again to the wonder and whimsy of the Krazy Kat comic strips that so enchanted me as a young person and made me wonder if I would ever be able to project such a magisterial vision as George Herriman's on the walls of my mind.

So okay, you pick among these ten things of yours and have at them.  If they don't help you to tuck into your day's writing session, I'm sorry to say you're fucked, which is a different kind of destination than the one I have in mind for both of us.  I have in mind a destination that is informed by The Three Princes of Serendip, a Persian folk tale which has come to us through a number of languages, leaving us with an uncanny sort of dramatic road map and the word serendipity.

You can, dear writer friends, follow the well-worn paths of tradition, plotting everything in advance, then arriving at your destination in mechanical fashion that promptly bites its thumbnail at any sense of realism.  You can, of course, follow the path of the three princes, arriving at your destination by happy chance, your destination coming as a complete and pleasing surprise for you, or perhaps not--perhaps not so pleasing as to seem mechanical, but pleasing enough to seem lifelike.  Besides, you've arrived at anticipated destinations before in your earlier works, you've been through the juggling, rearranging of plausibility as though it were cheap motel furniture.  That didn't make you feel as pleased at it might had you agreed to let the unthinkable come striding forward, inviting it in to accompany you on your way.

I leave it to you, dear friends:  We can cause our conclusions to have the heavy hands of event managers or we can follow those remarkable three princes who were actually from Sri Lanka and somehow, through the serendipity of translation and writers looking for destinations that will leave us with something of substance, found us.

Wile E. Coyote: The Things He Carried

products--equipment, merchandise, devises used by characters to advance story; material goods used by writers to denote living conditions, relative affluence, degrees of decadence, boredom inherent in characters; things people want or conspicuously do not want in stories.

Nowhere in stories are products given a more substantive and metaphoric treatment than the cartoon adventures of Wile E. Coyote. In these iconic dramatic ventures, Coyote lurches forth, a faithful replication of Mark Twain's description of the species from Roughing It. Coyote's hunger prods him to consider as prey The Roadrunner; the extensive number of Coyote-Roadrunner cartoons a monument to Coyote's abject failure. The rules surrounding the Wile E. Coyote landscape are myriad and inflexible, at once rendering the terrain a cross breed between Beckett and Krazy Kat. Coyote must not catch Roadrunner. Coyote's attempts at catching Roadrunner invariably end in his humiliation. Coyote may use devices such as explosive tennis balls, giant mouse traps, do-it-yourself tornado kits, and female Roadrunner costumes, but these and all others like them must come directly from the Acme Corporation. No other organization, neither Kafkan bureaucracies nor Orwellian imperialists, is so catholic in its offered menu of product; no government or manufacturer has such a smorgasbord of devices which, taken in totality, could be seen to represent the quintessential formula for curing all ails and supplying answers for all needs. In point of fact, some of the items on the Acme Corporation's list work, they simply do not work for Wile E. Coyote. But rules are rules, meaning Coyote has no recourse; if he is to use products, they must come from Acme.

Probably based on the ubiquity and comprehensiveness of the original Sears-Roebuck mail order catalogues, the Acme Corporation's arsenal of products and their built-in exclusivity for Wile E. Coyote become a metaphor for the writer who is setting forth, beginning with a particular landscape or locale, then basic rules of engagement between the major characters, then the source of materials the characters have at their disposal.

Wile E. Coyote's credit seems to be good so far as Acme Corporation is concerned; there don't seem to be any issues about accounts receivable. There are neither long, elaborate rationales about the Coyote-Roadrunner landscape nor the rules governing it. Neither, for that matter, are there distracting questions about the landscape within Beckett plays; Beckett stories hold up while being read, then become iron filings attracted to the magnet of the mind after the reading or witnessing ends. Similarly with Coyote and Roadrunner.

The message from Beckett ("Fail again, only next time, fail better.") inheres in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons; the after-the-fact paradigm of the cartoons with respect to story also becomes apparent with a personal deconstruction of the entire, precipitous southwestern mesa-butte landscape of the cartoon series.

Tim O'Brien has written a splendid account of American servicemen in Vietnam, The Things They Carried, a novel in which products play a major role in defining character and dramatic outcome. In the cartoons, Wile E. Coyote's frequent fate is having his hair singed off, falling to bottoms of steep declivities, being squashed by falling rocks or even the occasional debris from an Acme Corporation product; sometimes Coyote sustains all these fates simultaneously. O'Brien's characters inevitably reveal a distinct, moving relationship to a product, whether the product is a letter from a loved one (or a Dear John letter), a keepsake, a weapon. Coyote and O'Brien's "grunts" are set forth in an atmosphere and landscape that could not have suited Beckett better, thus is there a transcendent plateau reached and recognized when the writer brings characters with purpose and products to a locale, imbues them with constraints, restraints, and possibly even conscience.

Don't Fence Me in

A favored landscape for me is the mesa-and-butte sprawl of Arizona, a place where in real life you can actually find stores that sell Wolf Brand chili, a place known variously as Keams Canyon and Second Mesa. In real life it is a hub of Hopi culture set in co-mingle with tourists, no nonsense truckers, skeptical Navajo, and the odd anthropologist. In alternate universe life, it is the landscape of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, those iconic figures of yesterday's entry who play out their dharma on a regular basis. In another alternate landscape, equally reliant on mesas, buttes, tall stacks of sedimentary rock, and a merciless summer sun, those icons of the imagination of George Herriman, the eponymous Krazy Kat, Offisa Pup, Ignatz Mouse, and an ensemble to rival The Wire.

Nice when one area can bring you three separate universes, all of them brimming with the potsherds of human behavior. Nicer still when you can close your eyes for a visit to each. Such is the nature of place in story: Place assumes the same relevance, distinct qualities, and individuality as a first-rank character, sometimes bristling with small-town eclat or intransigence, sometimes as sprawling and impersonal as a major urban center. Sometimes, by its nature, landscape is the very place where an event is least suited to take place, creating an immediate sense of cosmic uproar. Other times, landscape is inhospitable, treacherous, menacing, as cranky as a kid on a hot day who has dropped his ice cream cone.

Much as I prefer a gritty, noirish or mischievous landscape, certain of these improbable places become prima facie apt, their improbability trumping their surreal nature, a warning to me and the reader than familiar, comfortable surroundings in art and literature are music to fall asleep by. A university is endlessly improbable to me, so are court houses, hospitals, department stores, publishing houses, supermarkets. Each of these attracts ordinary persons with needs, then transforms them into some aspect of its own improbability. The house rules of Second Mesa, the Hopi way, make beautiful sense, a transformative ethos shared by the neighboring Navajo, who actually have a saying, Go in beauty. The house rules of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner are in their way the equal of our own Bill of Rights. The governing forces of the comic strip Krazy Kat are informed by a lovely, whimsical logic that convinces us in short order that life within this landscape includes the rational and the irrational, where love may not triumph but nevertheless trumps all other distractions.

Finding a landscape is as troublesome as finding the proper character imbued with the proper quirks and needs. You must, I believe, make your landscape a haven for what you seek, buried perhaps, not readily apparent, but somewhere close to the surface. Or it must be a place of anomaly or a place where what you seek has a second home, somewhere at a great distance. Ladscape has the personality and smell and texture of someone you love, some place that "feels" happy to see you whenever you return.

A County of One's own

When you think regionalism in terms of American literature, your thoughts would likely be drawn sooner or later to Yoknapatawpha, a county in northern Mississippi, and once there, to its county seat, Jefferson. Neither of these venues are to be found on Map Quest or Google maps, but they exist with throbbing presence in much of the short stories and novels of William Faulkner. They began in his mind and were transmogrified into ours to the extent that those of us who have never set foot in Mississippi nevertheless believe we know that part of the world and the complex strata of individuals living in it.

On the other hand, as many Westerners know, Coconino is the name of a county in Arizona, its county seat is Flagstaff. With the exception of San Bernardino County, California, Coconino County is the largest of the counties in mainland United States, containing among other notable features The Grand Canyon. While we're at it, there is another Coconino County, not perhaps as well know or studied as William Faulkner's county, but influential nevertheless to those whose interests and talents reside in the graphic arts and literature.

I speak of the Coconino County of a cat, a mouse, and a dog, a world of surreal and whimsical beauty and accoutrement. The cat, sometimes rendered as male, other times female, is romantically drawn to the mouse. For his part, the mouse is the sworn enemy of the cat. The dog is a sworn member of the law enforcement establishment, one of his major jobs keeping the peace, which translates to preventing the mouse from throwing bricks at the cat or, arriving on the scene too late to prevent the launching of yet another brick, hauling the mouse off to the Coconino County jail for appropriate punishment. Thus you have Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Officer Bull Pupp.

The creator of Krazy Kat drew his last comic strip adventure shortly before his death in 1944, but for over sixty years, the legend and reach of arguably one of the great icons of pictorial story telling has attracted fans, influenced other artists, inspired some writers, and remains a cultural icon. Two other iconic contributors to the Valhalla of comic book art spoke to me with unabashed awe , enthusiasm, and admiration for George Herrimann's creation. Bob Kane, creator of Batman, confessed to an envy for the dream-like beauty of Krazy Kat; Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, said without hesitation that Krazy Kat drew him into wanting to create his own landscape, peopled with his own characters and animals.

Such is the wonderful nature of Krazy Kat, the feline, that he or she (but never it) is always ready to believe that the latest brick missile launched by Ignatz Mouse is a frank admission of requited love. In this image, Ignatz Mouse has pretended to be a picture in order to avoid detection until he has let fly with brick, catching Krazy Kat
unaware until the moment of contact, at which point, ah, true love.

It may be a stretch in time, but to show how iconic the Krazy Kat landscape of Coconino County is, we come half a century later to an equally surreal ensemble cast of characters slinking through the buttes, mesas, and cactus, none other than Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner, their agendas as clearly defined as their artistic forebears. This then becomes a panegyric to the landscape of the heart and mind, the place evolved through a combination of imagination, loneliness, desire for adventure, and the artistic need for much more than a room of one's own. They are there waiting for us, ready to pounce or throw bricks, motivated by love, purpose, and mischief.

'Twas Brillig

Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes,
The tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroght
Was tried for his tricherie, the trewest on erthe.
Hit was Ennias the athel and his highe kynde
That sithen depreced provinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneghe of al the wele in the West Iles...

No, that is neither Esperanto nor border Spanish/English, not some conflation of vowel, accent and consonant that will inform the language as it evolves from American English to Internet English. That is the opening of the original text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, not as set to paper by the original and, alas, anonymous poet, but probably by some contemporary scribe who made a copy. Fortunately, the copy remains intact, transporting us back to the time when our language had a more Germanic touch to it than it does now.

For most of my reading life, I have been fascinated by this historical time, particularly persistent in trying to convince various institutions to allow me to teach a course in Chaucer, spending some unsuccessful time trying to teach myself Anglo-Saxon, although some success is manifest whenever I knock over a cup of coffee or drop something balanced precariously on something else I'm carrying.

The opening above translates like this:

Once the siege and assault of Troy had ceased,
with the city a smoke-heap of cinders and ash,
the traitor who contrived such betrayal there
was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth;
so Aeneas, it was, with his boble warriors
went conquoring abroad, laying claim to the crowns
of the wealthiest kingdoms in the western world...

The translator is the scholar/novelist Simon Armitage, who has, to the ex tent I've read, done a remarkable job of making the language clear, evocative, and yet emblematic of the original language in use by the original poet when the narrative was first written. I'm reading this new translation because I admire the many earlier versions I have read, learning a bit more about the original and its language with each new version. It had not occurred to me before this version that the original begins with the sack of Troy, the bare bones of The Iliad. Nor had it remained in my mind that the opening also referenced another of the so-called classical pillars of Western literature, The Aeneid, of Cano arma virumque fame (I sing of arms and the man)by Virgil, which was later made much fun of by G.B. Shaw in his play, Arms and the Man.

It is interesting to speculate that the Gawain poet may well have been showing off; he was certainly an educated poet to have heard of the Trojan War and, indeed, the Aeneid; he may also have been trying to appeal to a particular audience with those references which. having been made, are dropped forthwith in favor of the present story, which involves King Arthur and his crew, having a bit of a Christmas gala when into their midst rides a strange, unearthly knight, all in green, seeming as odd and menacing to the Arthurian Round Table as Marlon Brando's Johnny Strabler character in the film, The Wild One.

Revivications of older works have, in modern times, resulted in some notable failures. King Kong comes to mind, along with legions of filmic remakes including the transmogrification of Seven Samurai into The Magnificent Seven although the Japanese version of Macbeth played well enough to leave a lasting impression, and some-but-not-all transformations of Shakespeare plays into other settings or time frames than they were intended have survived well, even to the point of providing fresh insight into the original as well as leaving a sense of some relevance to our present time.

I can imagine no better way for a writer to "get" a work from the past than to do a modernization of it, a thought that immediately causes me to wonder how Alexander Pope's magnificent jape, The Rape of the Lock, might play out as a contemporary venture. My current sense of having found the distinguished restaurant or splendid gift shop or used book store is The Canterbury Tales by he who was probably as urbane as Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh, rolled up into one, Geoffrey Chaucer, in many ways the father of our language of poetry, humor, and irony. As a youngster, just past the having learned to read stage, I recall weekly supplements in the Sunday Examiner, the morning Hearst paper in Los Angeles. There were the Charles Lamb synopses of Shakespeare plays and someone--I forget who--doing modern readable Canterbury Tales. There was also Krazy Kat, but that was another matter, or perhaps not, now that I think of it. I was affected and effected by those surreal tales of whim, pathos, and magic to the point where in my head Ignatz Mouse, Krazy Kat, and Offisa Pup were as real as the Knight, the pardoner, the Wife of Bath, and the entire Canterbury-bound ensemble cast.

Dream on. And watch out for slithy toves.