That's the Spirit

What was it like there, in that place you were writing about with such focus that the sense of time became like a sink running over?  That meant you were pretty well inside the narrative, had the characters placed so that you knew if they had to shout at one another or could rely on a stage whisper.  Of course, if the narrative were not fiction, you had the arguments placed in some semblance of blocking so you could tell if they had to shout at one another or could, yep, rely on a whisper.

You're getting at The Spirit of Place for a particular reason; you wish to take on in your own way from D. H. Lawrence, where he left off in his prefatory material to Classic Studies in American Literature.  You have been touched, teased, and inspired by Lawrence's work since you first read it, years back.  You loved his voice then, you listen to it even more closely now because, in this remarkable work of his, he gives you vital cues about how to listen to him; you get the sense of what sort of fellow he was, and you admire his read on America, gained so quickly from his time here and, of course, from his reading of those who came and went before him and helped define the very sense of place he was writing about.

The Spirit of Place has a special place in this nonfiction project, but in anticipation of it, you need to remind yourself that Spirit of Place is a presence in every scene in every story; it captures not only those basic sensual things as humidity or lack thereof, or height or whether the smell is from sage brush or the iodine of the ocean, it is the character of the place, blazing in on the senses of your characters, making them aware of their comfort or discomfort, their sense of vulnerability or safety, their ease or sense of being socially one or two or three down in relationship to all those standing or sprawling or, perhaps, lurking about.  If John, a character, ventures into a convenience store for a Reese's Peanut butter Cup, he must take in the Spirit of that place, register it however briefly, demonstrating among other things the power of the right word.

Spirit of Place is political, ethnic, ethical, social; it is gang turf or the simultaneous off-putting and achievement oriented strand of Rodeo Drive; it is run-down-at-the-heels tenderloin or newly gentrified downtown, it is L.A.'s Bunker Hill, it is Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.  It is all the ambiance of all the places you enjoy, say the Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles on Pico.  The need for Spirit of Place is basic and is to be sketched into stories as though through the literary equivalent of Japanese calligraphy.  The Spirit of Place for the nonfiction work you're contemplating is more attitudinal, more reflective of the Balkanization process going on amongst the political factions; it must suggest and intimate absolute quirkiness and borderline madness rampant not only in the U.S., but which is part of the human condition everywhere.  You are political, no denying that nor is there any sense denying your own quirkiness and idiosyncratic nature.  Nor, since the entire idea is triggered by a  book written by D. H. Lawrence, who has a few quirks and wrinkles of his own, should you want to ignore these.

Our Truck Will Be in Your Neighborhood...

Politics have been the essential nature of the larger groups or organizations you have been associated with. You first became aware of this as you considered the politics of your family, both on your mother's and father's side and, indeed, in their reactions to one another. Much of the politics radiated outward from one individual, its effects coming back to haunt you much later in life. Your next significant awareness came when, as an undergraduate, your attention was directed to the generalization in a political science class, from which meetings you strode into the politics of the campus humor magazine of which you were the editor and then, when politics and your writing got the humor magazine on the wrong side of the administration, you tumbled into the politics surrounding the daily student newspaper. From that point onward, you might put the matter into a neat apothegm by appreciating the politics of every relationship.

Politics left the campus with you when your two o'clock class ended and you rode crosstown to the Los Angeles Times building at First and Spring Streets, wherein you took the stairs or elevator depending on your whim to the editorial floor, whereupon you repaired to the night office of The Associated Press. Indeed there were politics.

Even when you opted out of a job with a newspaper in, of all places, Calexico, in order to spend the next several summers working for the Foley and Burke Shows, a carnival that rode the county fair circuit throughout California and Nevada, there were politics and, to a near equal degree, sociology. You, as an agent or manager of a concession booth (baseball throw, dart throw, Guess-Your-Weight, etc) were of a higher status than the ride monkeys, men who assembled and disassembled the rides and admittance shows, not quite as lofty as a concession owner who was your employer, nor as schedule-bound as the food preparation workers.

Politics followed you into unemployment and attempts to make your living as a writer, even when you were living in near hermetic seclusion and your big night out on the town was going to the post office to mail manuscripts or the monthly party at your agent's. A different kind of politics rode the Greyhound Bus with you to Mexico City where, because you had a letter of introduction to someone who knew someone, you were able to earn approximately 100 pesos for short, vaudeville-like skits.

It was political when you went to work for a publisher, more political yet when you moved to being the so-called West Coast editor for a New York publisher, and ever so much more political when you invented your way into a job with a scholarly publisher that resulted in your moving to Santa Barbara, and it was politics that made you decide against the offer that would have returned you to New York to run a publishing venture that was much more to your taste and ability than the scholarly publisher.

You appear to have forgotten the politics that leap-frogged you from mere membership in the Mystery Writers of America to a series of elected offices, a circumstance where your awareness of politics among writers reached an intensity you thought was the absolute acme--until you discovered the politics of the university and the faculty, leading you to the belief you still hold that the politics of a faculty who are unabashed writers--novelists, poets, short-story writers, dramatists--is the most corrosive of all.

Some of these recollections came tumbling forth this morning at the usual Friday coffee gathering, where the more or less regular group contains at least two of your fellow workshop leaders at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference and upwards of four who have attended the conference for at least five years. Your response to an observation that there was no politics among the workshop leaders began as a mild rumble, growing in intensity to a six or seven on the Richter Scale.

It is the nature of the writer to grow in stature to a point of competence at which publication, thought not guaranteed, is a likely prospect. This state of mind causes an amalgam of emotions including defensiveness and the basic law of drama which states that every character believes he is right. The state may include arrogance or humility or indifference or curiosity; no matter, they are all scooped from the carpet of effort by the vacuum cleaner of compulsive and obsessive behavior. Your own favored ad hominem labels for writers you know and do not care for start with laziness and emphatically include derivative.

Whenever you find in yourself the qualities you see as reprehensible in other writers, you pause to take inventory. Your plan is to set these qualities in perspective and neatly package them so that the next time the telephone rings and someone from Goodwill or The Salvation Army or the Alpha Thrift Store calls to tell you of its truck that will be in your neighborhood, you can invite them to stop by. Some perfectly good hubris here on Hot Springs Road. Hey, I'll leave the derivative material, all those stories with the equivalents of polo players on them, right out front.

You are thinking there is the beginnings of something rumbling around in these remembrances and recollections of yourself engaged in the politics of self, thinking they are about your dealings with writers when, in fact they are the outriders of your awareness of the reasons writers hone themselves into lonely travelers, thinking to protect their growing individuality and vision while wanting at the same time to pay some recognition to the social nature that lurks inside.

Politics as Usual

politics--approaches to the use of power; systematic applications of problem solving; means by which divergent groups or individuals attend ethical, moral, and social issues; points of view regarding group and individual governance.

All characters have politics, whether they know it or not. A basic approach to determine a character's political views comes from investigating that character's family background, both in terms of the character's general political views but also from an assessment of that character's gender, the number of siblings, and when that character arrived in the family. Individuals who are adopted may have yet other political dynamics including a curiosity to learn the identities of their biological parents. Orphans or characters who have broken relations with family have yet another political as well as psychological dynamic.

For the writer, knowing the political Petri dish of the character's psyche is vital, providing information about the character's attitudes, responses, and readiness to form alliances and enmities. Of equal significance, a writer needs to consider his or her politics or lack of interest in the broader sense of politics, then investigate personal senses of awareness within family, friend groups, workplace associates, and ties with former classmates.

Of all the many influences likely to emerge in the themes of a particular writer's work, the writer's personal and broadband politics rank close to the top of the pyramid, influencing choice of characters and the types of conflicts in which those characters engage. As examples of writers whose politics or political interests seem to shine through their pages, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, John P. Marquand, and Margaret Atwood inspire close study.



quest--a major goal for any character; an intensified apprenticeship undertaken in hopes of achieving virtuoso ability; a search, study. or other organized pursuit with a goal in mind; a systematic and insistent research; an attempt to find a meaning, relic, or understanding.

Sometimes a quest is for a tangible, physical place, other times it is the means by which a point of view or personal commitment is achieved. Everyone in fiction is on a quest. Often, relationships in fiction are abrogated because of conflicting quests, thus the importance of knowing what each character in a story wants, how seriously, and to what lengths the character will go to achieve the end results of the quest. Murder? Perhaps. Betrayal of principal? Perhaps. Treason? A likely possibility.

A popular add-on to the quest being achieved or realized can be found in the irony of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Was Charles Rider's quest in Brideshead Revisited any the less ironic? And what about the payoff of The Maltese Falcon? For a writer, knowing what a character wants is a major step toward realizing a memorable story; it is no less important for the writer to know how the character might behave having seen the quest through to completion. Would Gatsby have been truly happy with Daisy? For that matter, would Daisy have remained content to be with Gatsby? And while we're on the subject, Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy each appeared at the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice to have arrived at a goal of a companionable, partnership-type marriage, but would they remain so ten years down the line?

Thus quest, the dramatic boulder of Sisyphus, poised at the peak of a hill.

What's So Funny?

Humor is the result of something happening to you or someone else who is taking a moral high ground as though it were a military objective in a John Wayne movie. Humor is the product of you or someone consciously or unconsciously attempting a promotion in status or importance. Humor is someone's ox being gored, a literal or figurative slip, a gift from some high-flying bird that immediately reduces status and stature. Humor is the result of two persons thinking they've reached an agreement only to discover later on that they were agreeing to two different things.

Humor is literally and figuratively being thrown from a high horse; it is the deflation of pomposity, the lowering of status, the fall from grace of an individual or organization attempting to maintain dignity by overreach. Splendid targets for humor are moral superiority, exaggerated virtue or wisdom, pretentiousness.

In other words, humor always has a victim. Without a victim there can be no humor, thus the notion that humor, of all the literary and rhetorical devices, is the heat-seeking missile that can bring down pretentiousness and absurdity with the most immediate effect. We enjoy being laughed with, which is to say, we enjoy sharing a joke; we do not, however, enjoy being laughed at, for this is a sign that we are not what we pretended to be.

Humor is dramatic by nature, which is to say it comes as the result of interactions between individuals and organizations; involves persons doing things or not doing other things; it is the result of situation, dramatic reversal, possibly even surprise. If it is a well-placed barb or rejoinder, a clever pun or play on words, sorry; it doesn't make the grade as humor even though it may produce one or both responses associated with humor, the laugh or the groan. Such events are wit and perhaps even witty; as Mark Twain said of the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, there is a world of difference.

Humor is often found sharing the same living quarters with tragedy or some form of pathos. In a memorable Charlie Chaplin film, Chaplin, as the Tramp, becomes helplessly and hopelessly in love with a blind girl at a flower stand, often pausing in his daily routine to stare wistfully at her as she arranges flowers, sets up vases and plants, goes about her work of tending her stall. One day as he watches the girl, he gets too close and she, unaware of his presence, throws out a vase of water--right in his face.

Although you will hear different opinions about its appropriateness, humor may appear anywhere because it is volatile and because it is a constant reminder that the more serious we become, the more likely we are to provoke some element, perhaps several elements of humor.

The three things we are enjoined from injecting humor into are sex, religion, and politics. It is easy to see why this injunction is sometimes broadcast; with the possible exception of death and funerary matters, there are few things funnier than sex, religion, and politics, either our own or someone else's.

Where to look for humor? Everywhere. Start with groups of individuals involved in institutions: families, schools, churches, clubs, professions. Think of it this way, Humor is the street people of society, reminding us in sharp, memorable jabs that our best intentions and best laws and best inventions and compositions are all vulnerable. Humor looms like Magwich in the graveyard scene in Great Expectations, the unthinkable come to pass, the unthinkable come to laugh at us and our serious.

That's not funny, they will tell you, as though that could stop anything.