Interview # 2

Interviewer:  So far as we have been able to determine, the oldest written examples of exploits were fragments of your adventures,  Do you think history has given you a fair shake?

Gilgamesh:  What fair shake?  Bunch of damned paparazzi and worse.  Couldn't even get the spelling right on my name.  I tell you, it has not been an easy time of it, scribes coming out of the academies, wanting to make a name for themselves, first thing they do, King Gilgamesh is not a righteous dude, knocking of a monster here, taxing a village to death over there, despoiling countryside I never even saw.

Interviewer:  If you had the opportunity, how would you present yourself?

Gilgamesh:  Well, given my background and all--you know--two-thirds related to gods, Dad being Lugabanda and all, and having had a big impact on pretty well caused what is now Iraq to be dug up all to hell and gone, which, incidentally, I visited, couple of times, actually, I more or less like the idea of rebranding myself as that guy, whatsis name?  Wrote a book about his exploits.  Decision Points, it was.

Interviewer:  You can't mean--

Gilgamesh:  Yeah.  Guy got out of the military with some flimflam about the National Guard.  Hell, man, I invented the National Guard, did you know that?

Interviewer:  But seriously.  Decision Points.  That was written by--

Gilgamesh:  Man, you don't want to go around believing everything you believe was written by everyone you believe wrote it.

Interviewer:    You mentioned having traveled to the underworld,

Gilgamesh:  Yeah, and when I got back, there was that big cuneiform tablet, Mission Accomplished.  I want you to know, I had nothing to do with that.  Not my idea.  You're a king, it's got to be like modest, understand. 

Interview

Interviewer:  You first appeared in public about two years before the California Gold Rush.  How do you account for your consistent popularity, particularly as compared to a character who appeared almost to the day when you first did?

Eyre:  Oh, you must mean that Sharp woman, Rebecca Sharp.  We have in common the fact of our being social outsiders, but there the similarity comes to an abrupt end.  If you'll recall, she cultivated and used charms to seduce upper class men.

Interviewer:  But you married one.

Eyre:  Only after his wretchedly mad first wife committed suicide and in the process created a fire that cost Rochester a hand and the sight of one eye.  I might add that I had inherited twenty thousand pounds  from my uncle, and was thus independent before I married Rochester.  Need I remind you, twenty thousand pounds at that time was the equivalent of well over a million today.

Interviewer:  It is still a stretch for some of today's readers to see what you saw in Rochester.  He clearly would have entered a bigamous marriage with you, and when that didn't work, he urged you to come to the south of France with him, there to live as though you were husband and wife.  If I count correctly, he had two previous mistresses--


Eyre:  Three, actually.

Interviewer: And then there was the matter of Adele Varens, whom Rochester referred to as his ward. Isn't it possible that she was his daughter?

Eyre:  I don't think so.  Rochester doesn't think so.  If you observe the two of them together, you'll see no family resemblance.

Interviewer:  In filmed versions of your remarkable rise from the orphanage to humble governess to teacher, Rochester was portrayed by Orson Welles and George Scott.

Eyre:  Neither of whom, I thought, captured the real Rochester, the essential man who had, don't you see, changed greatly over the course of his life.  Welles seemed to be portraying himself more than Rochester, and Scott--well, he impressed me as practicing to be General Patton.  I was quite satisfied with the real Rochester.

Interviewer:  I notice yet another filmed version of your saga.  What advice do you have for an actress wishing to render a vision of you that you'd approve?

Eyre:  Don't even think feminism, not any more than The Wife of Bath thought feminism or issues of equality.  If you don't bring equality to the table at the very start, men all about you and the sorts of women I think of as toadeys will play boys' and girls' games.  Life is not a game.  Not unless you allow it to become one.  Life is a serious exchange of moral choices and a belief in one's self.

Interviewer:   Do I detect aspects of Ayn Rand here?


Eyre:  Oh, please.  Be serious.

Cattle Call

You are interviewing potential employees prior to starting up an imaginative new venture for which you have already secured a significant investment of capital and as well tried to account for future needs and active demands.

It is not as though this is a new enterprise for you; there have been times in the past where you were indeed not a mere go to your office and do your work employee, you were cast in a supervisory role as well as the work you were expected to do in your office (but had to do at home or on weekends, when no one else was there, because of meetings, interruptions, reports, correspondence, telephone calls, and, yes, did you forget to mention meetings?)You actually had in those situations the pleasant experience of interviewing and hiring your own departmental persons, men and women who brought something of value to their work on a daily basis.

Nevertheless, you are hesitant because you do not have the nuanced vision for this new project that you had as an individual who was hired by a publishing company that had a nuanced vision of its own which you were invited to share.

The fact of the matter is, in most cases, when you were setting forth, you were doing so with the equivalent of what your forebears did so many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years ago, did when they started out:  they carried some pieces of flint that, when struck together, were known to produce a spark, which could be manipulated into a flame large enough to begin consuming sufficient twigs and logs for a fire by which to cook and warm one's self against the cold.  You were starting out with a spark or the equivalent materials for creating a spark.  Although you had no objections to a tummy filled with cooked food and a cozy enough space for sleeping and working, you were more interested in seeing the shapes of things about you in the night, lest you trip over them, mistake the commonplace for the extraordinary, discern presences and scenarios that were entire products of your fear-filled apprehensions.

Here you are now, interviewing individuals for a work-related venture for which you are experiencing inchoate visions and potentials, humming as though to itself, yet somehow the song has a vague familiarity you must extend yourself to recognize.  Once you recognize and are able to render that song in your own voice, however atonal and imprecise your voice is, you will have experienced the immense profit of having made that particular song a part of you.  From such riches, you progress.

Into the interviewing room now arrives a man of middle years, mid fifties, you'd say, an almost perfect size forty from the racks, if it were not for the slight appearance of a tummy, working against his belt.  You look toward the eyes and nose, alert for signs of the tippler:  bloodshot eyes, puffy under lids, a trace of red and blue highways running across his nose.  None of these outward symptoms of the incessant drinker is manifest; his jade green eyes meet yours with a friendly directness.  His gaze is steady, non-defensive.   His handshake is firm, his nails neat, trimmed.  His shoes are polished, his trousers, most likely Dockers or some mid-market catalog, are crisp; he either ironed them for this interview or perhaps went so far as to wash and iron them; they are a comfortable fit with his blazer that sits with casual ease on his bony shoulders.  In keeping with the current fashion, his blue gingham shirt is opened at the collar.  A neat pocket square has been folded into his breast pocket, a considerate wedge for his tortoise-shell reading glasses.  You know he will do, a fact that, for idiosyncratic reasons, rankles you.

"Please, please," you tell him, indicating a Bank of England chair across from you, "sit, Mr.--"

"Strether,"  he says, nods, sits, giving his trouser legs the slight pinch of a man accustomed to tailored trousers and to sitting in drawing rooms.  "Lambert Strether."

He did not, of course, have to introduce himself.  You knew him.  Of him, really.  Had done so for some years now.  And oh, how you'd hoped to find some reason for being put off, for being able to be dismissive of him, to use a number two Dixon-Ticonderoga pencil to draw a line through his name on the list of applicants in your folder, to be dismissive of him as you have been in the past, to be dismissive as well of the person whose ideas and notions Lambert Strether was from the beginning.  

As you know only too well, Strether was a significant force, you might say the filtering force through which Henry James filtered the events and awareness of his novel, The Ambassadors.  Here he is, nearly a hundred ten years after his appearance, accepted for work in a project you are venturing to design, joining others, men, women, and youngsters, in a vision you now see as a sort of dictionary of characters, entering your proposed pages with full credit to the pages in which they first appeared, but also as exegesis, in which their place in our minds and hearts has become so firm a presence.  In some ways, the proliferation of reading has given our species more myth and legend, figures with endurance to equal those who emerged from the shadowy stages of the oral tradition.

dramatis personae, including Howard Roark and Dominique Francon, in whom Rand appears to have been inventing herself.

Do not allow yourself to think that all the successful applicants for this dictionary will be chosen to allow your edge to brush against those with whom you have some form of grudge or, worse, against whom you bear the grudge of being boring.   Strether has quite turned you around, and of course, aware as you are of how boring agreement and approval can be, you will include favorites.  In fact, right here in your hand is an application from the potential next hire, a Miss Eyre.  Miss Jane Eyre.  And remember this, at one time, you bore her a grudge for having married Rochester.  In a lovely conflation/confusion of Oedipals, you wanted her for yourself.

Journey

You have bought your ticket, boarded the tour bus, settled back in your seat with some degree of humming anticipation.  Moments later, the bus clanks into gear like an arthritic knee extending, then careens off.  As the driver maneuvers through a series of preliminary turns, his voice a sudden nasal bleat over the intercom before welcoming you aboard, hinting at the excitement to come, your anticipation flattens like a souffle in a junior high school cooking class.  You tumble into the sinking awareness that you are on the wrong bus, headed toward a destination at some remove from your expectations.

Was it the turns executed by the driver?  Perhaps the lackluster welcome, or the sense of it being read without too much enthusiasm from a script that had been read again and again?

Whatever.

You are off, as in put off.

Off the bus.

The same process applies to a book you have in some manner come by.  Nor does this exclude so-called ARCs, advanced reading copies which you might be tempted to read in advance of their LD Date, which is to say lay down date at a book store.  You even bring to the table your own designation, the BLC, the belated reading copy of a book such as, say, Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, which you mean to reread prior to your review of it for the Golden Oldies cycle of your weekly book review.

Your purpose is transparent:  to entertain, maybe even instruct yourself.  This is the way it should also be for the writer in the act of composing.  Of course writing is a difficult craft, but why would difficulty prevent a writer from trying to write something that would give entertainment and possible instruction?

Who says writing, for all its potential for difficulty, should not nevertheless be pleasurable?  Without masochism.

The transparency of your purpose persists with this:  As you set forth, whether to read, to write, to reread, to revise, you feel the buzz of anticipation similar to the departure on a journey.  You expect to be transported somewhere.  Fuck the notion that reading is a passive experience.  You do not read in a passive manner; you are contributing and thus reading is not as mere entitlement; it is earned result.  So, too, is writing.  If you are not pleased with the result of it, you revise or throw away and begin anew.  If revision fails to please you, the option is there for re-revision.  Maybe it is not a perfect symmetry, but all the same a symmetry of some form.

The journey begins with a word.

Then another.

Aha, now you are going somewhere.

Where will you be taken?

Authentic Organic Prose

What notional and mischievous creatures we are with our responses to what is and what is not actual or, to use another plangent buzzword, authentic.

When you invent something from bolts of whole cloth of your imagination, then call it story, and in particular call it a fictional narrative, you are nevertheless presenting the material in such a way that most of those who read it will take it as though it could have happened in reality.  As they read, they will have let the pretense of the material as real slip into the background, all the subsequent while having suspended cynicism and disbelief, thinking the story is an eavesdrop on believable persons.

When you invent something from those same bolts of whole cloth, then say some if it or all of it happened in the reality before us, you are advancing the notion of yourself as a historian, someone with a degree of rigidity to his standards of reliability.  Thus, by inference, his narrative really happened.

The inexpert writer who is challenged by readers of his narrative that it lacks verisimilitude, the writer's defense is "But it really happened that way," as though that statement were sufficient cause for the reader to accept the narrative as true.

Of all the things that irritate you upon your entry into a place of performance, the disclaimer "Based on an actual story," or, better still, "Based on a real ( or true )story"  irritates most, causing you to wonder what part of the story was invented and what part real.  In some fast food restaurants, automated soft drink dispensers carry more honest labels such as fifteen percent juice, or contains lemon flavoring but 0% lemon.  You know where you stand.  In similar fashion, when you read that this is the actual juice taken from fresh grapefruit, you are alert to the fact of it not being from concentrated grapefruit or any other kind of fruit, but when you are informed of story being based on an actual story, you are in safer hands with the fifteen-percent lemonade.

The catch therein is in how effective the story--actual or shall we say "enhanced" is presented.  When we are presented with history and told it is historical fact, we may be safe in assuming the historian who researched the material was not a complete objective observer, but as he or she assessed the gathered data, came to some conclusion, which was then presented with due diligence.  Nope, that's saying historians are remarkable for not having a particular bias or vision.  Depending on the travel gear we bring with us when we sit to read or to watch, we are in no small way subject to the seductive dance of the text, presenting its evidentiary track of events and relics to us, leaving us no idea which if any events or relics were left out in the interests of space or time or both.

In some cases, as students and as writers, we are asked to provide a vision of a person, place, or event. The professor or the assigning editor may ask us to supply a new interpretation, a new read of probability based on what was at the time of writing a plausible reality as opposed to being based on a theory based on a real story.

The best we can hope for is to get ourself there to a point of as much belief and understanding as possible based on the material we have on hand and then the inferences come in, colored by the same cultural lathes that shaped our own psyche.  The best we can also hope for is that ineffable something that transmits plausible probability.  In that sense, fiction is more honest than fact unless it is the drama documented with journals, diaries, eyewitness reports.  The more plausible fiction becomes, the greater likelihood for the reader to believe it is the true account the writer wanted to tell in nonfiction but could not bring himself or herself to do so for fear of backlash.  You hear it with greater frequency now:  I'll read the novel to get at the actual story, which is the story by subtext, irony, and implication.  And even if the reader is presented with the actual score of a baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, played at Dodger Field, and the reader knows for a fact which team won, the reader also wants to know other human details such as those that go on in the parking lots, after the game, out of the watchful or not-so-watchful eyes of the security guards, details such as severe and violent beating.

How much can we know?  How much of what we know is verifiable?  How can we trust the verification?  What would we have done instead of what we did do if only we had known the truth? 

This is absurd!

Your strategy at the moment is to return to the novel in progress by the end of next week, picking up the clutter and broken china all about you as a result of having to put all efforts into revision on what was once The Fiction Writers' Tool Kit as it morphed into The Fiction Lovers' Companion.  That will be more of a leisurely process for at least two reasons, a significant one being you do not yet have a thematic closure in mind, a no less significant one being the questioned proposed by Ms. Lopoppolo, your literary agent, "So what's wrong with turning it into a murder mystery, Mr. Regional President of the Mystery Writers of America?" It was the same question raised by Jean Harfenist, a writer you much admire.  One robin does not make a Spring, but two robins make a hell of a lot of noise.  The obvious character to kill off is clear to you; you'd put in a good deal of work by which you all but demonized him, with the intent of causing him to experience the equivalent of a conversion in the desert.  All the more reason to kill him off; the reader would care, and you'd be off to the races.

There is also your wish to have another work out and working for you, a sort of platform for making the novel into a viable series, with one being expected eighteen months after it hit.  There is a list of five projects the publisher of Companion is considering, all of which but one you believe you could have done by 1 January.  And thus you are puttering with these, looking for a clue among them as to which wants to be up next.

You've already begun leaning,but just these past several hours, yet another possibility has emerged, one that would be similar in its way to Companion, but not imitative of it, one you could see committing to deliver by, say 30 January 2012; it is an adjunct of the years you spent in scholarly publishing, wherein you made friends with the acronym KWIC, key words in context, as it applies to an index format.  There would be little of the scholarly and much of the idiosyncratic about Key Words for Writers:  Words, Phrases, and Concepts That Trash Talk Fiction Conventions.  Several times this year, you've blogged about particular words that seem to you to have some direct bearing on what story is and how it is formed.  As you sat before your screen for today's installment of your blog notes to yourself, almost before you could evoke the presence of the blog template, the word "absurd" came throbbing into your mind.

Absurd is a valuable tool awaiting the writer's serious consideration and direct use; it awakens somewhat like a cat ebbing forth from a nap, stretching languorously, sniffing the surrounding air, wondering about decisions.  Absurdity is the irrational, considering the preposterous; it is an interpretation of events, perhaps even the events themselves, that moves the beholder from observers of the ordinary to a newer plateau on which the great dance of the improbable is in full regalia.  The characters are behaving as though this surreal world in which they find themselves is every bit as structured and nuanced as the landscape we think of as ordinary, everyday, even if we wish to show off a bit, quotidian.  The absurd is an exact reversal of, say, The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy Gale and her dog, Toto, are transported from the ordinary of Oz to the forest primeval of Kansas, made to seek the portal of return to Oz after experiencing trials and tribulations.

Life on many levels is absurd, even today,when we are, in so many cultures, away from primitive shadows of linear, power-based social structure.  Some forms of social structure may produce the tyranny of conformity, but the possibilities inherent in more democratic structures are every bit as surreal and tyrannic, each in its own way.  We speak of theater of the absurd as a means of dramatizing the nuances of a particular social invasion, but for the observer to understand the nuanced implication, the observer must first see the absolute power of anarchy in his own strata before any standard of absurdity can take root.  In a lovely topsy-turvy of logic, the more things are made to remain conventional, the greater they are likely to split apart at the seams, spilling the contents of sanity before our eyes.

An individual with a vision may be an artist, a dreamer, or a lunatic; he may be simultaneously all three.  How absurd, after all, is it when we encourage our young to think outside the box, then award them the punishment of ostracism for having done so?

Writers--in fact all artists--need to keep their own tabs on what is absurd; it is the trampoline on which great bounding leaps of creativity have their origin, allowing the leaper to see with incremental bounds a tad beyond any given horizon.

Lost, Presumed Eaten By Coyotes: A Literary Voice

  The exciting thing about telling story is the way it lures you in by seeming so simple and direct a process at first, causing you to believe how you, too, with a little effort, can do it.

Soon, the honeymoon is over; you remain buoyed with romantic aftertaste, pleased to have made the commitment, but aware as well that you have only begun a journey where one thing is certain:  you have no idea of the destination.  To be sure, you have dreams about such things as venturing into something original or, failing that, becoming a force that affects untold numbers of readers.  Perhaps your dreams are more modest in scale, such as gaining proficiency in some category such as humor or tragedy; failing in those except on rare occasion, perhaps as an interesting educator.

Growing about you in stacks are the works of men and women, some of them young enough to be your children, others only a tad older than you, in each case with bodies of work.  Ah, there it is, the magic:  bodies of work.  Not one or two things,bodies of them.  From body it is easy to make the jump to ghost, thus instead of bodies of work to represent you, there are ghosts wanting things of you, wanting you to go back to undo egregious error whether of fact or deed or application, so that they might have some rest and stop haunting you.  Sometimes ghosts have vengeance at heart, wanting to exact something from someone, perhaps even you.

In some ways, because of the whimsical manner in which you were drawn into the other side of publishing,the editorial side, in which it was your work to help others extend the true timbre and resonance of their voice, editing had the same adventurous pull, causing you to think, why not, you'd be learning things to help your own storytelling.  Then, before you knew it, the editing experience conspired to get you one teaching job after another.

Now, perhaps because you are in between projects, still in a real sense at play with choices beckoning you, you are aware of the incredible number of individuals who present themselves as editorial and publishing consultants, in some cases even as writing coaches.  You are some steps away from being cynical about it, from day to day varying your stand about MFA programs in creative writing, even wondering what creative writing is as opposed to uncreative writing.  You toy with the idea of ordering business cards in which you are advertised as a literary voice coach or perhaps a literary detective,specializing in helping your clients locate lost or missing voices.

The best detective force in the world for locating a voice is a completed manuscript.