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.

Convention Wisdom

convention--an agreement among publishers and readers for mechanical usage such as punctuation; an accepted common wisdom relative to acceptable norms and understandings.

The convention for eating peas generally suggests the use of a fork or perhaps chopsticks--but not a knife. The convention for point of view in a short story was first-person or third person, shifting to include omniscient after the significant contribution of William Trevor in that area. The convention for verb tense in fiction was based on the calculus of past tense representing present moment, with past perfect indicating completed past action, and the imperfect tense--used to, or would--being action occasionally but not habitually done in the past. These conventions apply to Indo-European languages and are not in immediate danger of changing or shifting, but along about the time Bobbie Ann Mason's short story, "Shiloh, appeared in the New Yorker, a convention was developing that allowed Ms. Mason and any other writer who chose, to use the present tense--Fred gets up--to indicate events supposedly taking place before our eyes.

After reading works first written or published in earlier centuries, it is possible to determine the zeitgeist of that century, the use and organization of language being a literary dipstick used to measure the oil. For those who experience difficulties with the conventions of other centuries, say the fourteenth, it is possible to secure a modern--twentieth or twenty-first-century--recasting of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, rendering them in modern convention.

For some time, the conventional wisdom was that the three things not to be written about, particularly with humorous intent, were sex, religion, and politics. In the twenty-first century, it has become nearly impossible to write about politics without mentioning sex and religion; there are clear-cut politics in discussions of religion and sex, there are at the very least gender politics in discussions of sex, but just as often there are religious connotations. Just ask D. H. Lawrence.

Convention has become the elephant in the literary living room; if a particular convention is taken on merely for the sake of being contentious, the result is apt to become polemical, evangelical, or screed, and we all know how these sound. If the taking on of a convention makes for a more illuminated story, the result is apt to become inspirational. Unfortunately, there is too much of the former. In mitigation, the writer has humor.

You're Getting to Be a Hobbit with Me

Golem, the--a fictional being, made of clay and other elements, called into being in order to correct a moral, social, or social injustice, usually associated with Jewish folklore and tradition; often a servant of a prominent and learned rabbi; a series of servant-beings beginning with Adam, intended for a serious, life-affirming task before being deactivated, stored for future use should it be necessary.

The best-known Golem was a sixteenth-century creature, created by the chief rabbi of Prague from clay of the banks of the Vitava River, brought to life with incantations and a seal placed on its forehead bearing the Hebrew word "truth," its job to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitism.

The Golem bears an interesting analogy to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a farmer who was appointed as dictator of Rome by the Roman senate when the Romans were engaged in warfare with the neighboring Aequians. Cincinnatus quickly took control, organized an army and a campaign to defeat the Aequians, returned the powers of dictator to the senate, whereupon he returned to being a farmer. Another comparison might be argued for the creation of Dr. Frankenstein, particularly since the word golem in Hebrew slang can also be interpreted as a witless hulk.

Over the rural and urban mythology surrounding various golems, a disturbing side effect of their powers indicated a usurpation of power after it was granted them, in some cases resulting in violence, selfishness, and hitting on the rabbi's wife. In most cases the tide of admiration and support for the golems turned to a tide of fear and revulsion.

There is a bit of the golem resident in all heroic characters, thus our need to watch them carefully and their need to watch themselves, This vigil is necessary whether they appear as historically accurate representations or manufactured dramatic quantities, leaving them as Napoleonic, individuals whose sense of mission is trumped by their enjoyment of power for its own sake, thus the need for the writer of heroic characters to be on guard for the side effects of power. The golem writ large is a theme found throughout Western literature, from The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare to the gun fight at OK Corral.

Cincinnatus remains over the years as a figure who used power wisely, meriting his choice as its recipient. No less remarkable in his own way was Atticus Finch who took up the role of defender with all due seriousness but who knew his own values and his own sense of justice.

P.S. The Hebrew word inked on the seal of the Prague golem's forehead was "emet," the word for truth. To make sure the golem was decommissioned, the "e" was removed, leaving the Hebrew word for death.

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?

If It Sounds Familiar

frame--the placing of a story or episode within a larger, organized or thematic format such as The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales, where it becomes a segment of a whole; to base a new story on the characters and plot of a previously published work. The framed tale concept is an advertisement for a multiple point of view narration.

James Thurber's memorable short story, "The Man in the Cat Bird Seat," is framed on the revenge concept that inspired Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado." Motion picture director and novelist Paul Mazursky framed an imaginative modern version of Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, while yet another version of that play was framed for television, casting the dramatic events at the time of the American Civil War. Katherine Anne Porter's novel, Ship of Fools, bears comparison to The Canterbury Tales in its use of a broad segment of national, social, and moral types, bound together in transit from one destination to another.

Any work of reputation is fair game for framing; Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court can be seen as being framed on the Arthurian legend, while James Joyce's Ulysses is scrupulously framed on the tales of Odysseus, returning home from the Trojan Wars and The Iliad, in which he played a major part. The major cautionary note for framing is that the framed version must stand on its own with interesting individuals engaged in arresting and enlightening story, even if the reader happens not to be aware of the original source. Another cautionary note: it is helpful for the reader to know the genesis of the framed work.

Some writers and critics would include the story-within-a-story concept (the play within Hamlet, for instance) as an adjunct of framing.

'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.

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.