Question: The Ploy's the Thing

Two of Shakespeare's most memorable and popular plays begin with questions.

Hamlet begins with the sentry, Bernardo, asking "Who's there?"  Even if you were coming to this play for the first time, the setting and the question would be intriguing.  What purpose would a sentry on the battlements of a castle, late at night, have purpose to question anyone?  And who--or in this case what--would that presence be?  Why of course, it is a ghost, a royal ghost, impatient to talk to his son.  To what purpose?  Watch the play unfold to find out.

 Even though you've read and see the play in many versions, and now intend no pun with your observation, the question is a haunting one, causing you to fit yourself into a questioning frame of mind as you settle yourself into the familiar events and circumstances that are to envelop you, raising questions of your own as you become a by no means passive audience, rather you feel parts of yourself being haunted, tugged at, involved.  And you are left with a question, How many times will you have to experience this play to understand it.

This is not a question you can answer with any sense of ease.  Not yet.

Macbeth begins with the appearance of three witches on an open field, against a background of thunder and rain.  The first witch speaks.  "When shall we three meet again?"  Here we are, seeing them straight off, already knowing they will meet again soon, after a battle that has yet to be fought will be completed and the winner decided. A few slight exchanges and we are presented with a number of establishing facts.  They are indeed witches.  There will be a battle.  They will meet at sundown, after the battle.  They will meet Macbeth.

Why will they meet Macbeth?  Once again, you can suppose coming to this remarkable drama for the first time, with no clue of what is to come.  You have no reason, when the three exchange their lines, to suspect that they are witches, not, that is until the seventh line, from the first witch, who is answering to her familiar,"I come, Graymalkin!"  Lines eight and nine confirm our awareness; the other two respond to calls from their familiars, whom we cannot see.

By the time they reassemble to meet Macbeth, have they got news for him.  And because they are witches, whether we believe in witchery or not is no longer a matter.  We are in the story.  We see the conversation between them and Macbeth; we see its effect on Macbeth.  We are in, in, in.

Once again, you are left with a question, How many times will you have to experience this play in order to understand it?  Given you've done your work in interpreting its implications for yourself, how much more is there for you to unravel.  All this time it's taken you to "get" the image of Macbeth, having decided to kill King Malcolm, now sees the servant carrying Malcolm's dinner to him, interrupting Macbeth's famed soliloquy of "If it is to be done, better it is done quickly," the "it" being the murder.  Macbeth is conflating the servant carrying Malcolm's supper with The Last Supper, and thus,
 Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air.

Macbeth is hit with a blast of conscience, forestalling his resolve.  We know what that's going to mean; Macbeth, getting worked over by his wife for not having the courage to do what they'd agreed upon.

Here you are, four hundred years later, pondering the effects of starting with questions, first as they relate to one of the major storytellers of the culture, wondering about how effective actual questions as dialogue or in narrative as interior monologue can be helpful in setting story in motion while at the same time causing the reader to say, yes, this is story and I am in it.

The question does not have to be as direct as "Who's there?" or "When shall we three meet again?" It could be a lingering, hovering decision a character has to make and may require the balance of the story to reach.  It may be the question that arose within your own curiosity, wondering what characters would do in such a situation as you are about to set in motion, already beginning to gnaw at you because you'll have wondered how you'd respond under similar circumstances.

All this leaves you feeling a connection between story and question you've been visiting ever since you began trying to learn how to relate a story.

This is not a question you can answer with any sense of ease.  Not yet.

Revision in Dramatic Writing and Life

Variations on the theme of revision, brought to mind after this morning's workshop session.  A number of persons starting new projects, wise enough to have characters in motion, pursuing event or, in one notable case, having event pursue them.

You come away from the two-and-a-half-hour session with undifferentiated energy and drive to compose.  There is an editing chore for a literary agent that requires a final wrap-up and the prospect of a long, delicious afternoon and evening addressing editorial notes on two of the twelve short stories to be included in your forthcoming collection.  Both projects exciting, in combination using both sides of the brain.

Then the concept comes floating before you, neither editorial or diving back into stories long ago finished, sent off to different journals, accepted, and published.  This is a what-if concept.  What if events in reality were first-draft, much as the excellent first-draft material you heard this morning was.  Combinations of event, backstory, background, and a welter of detail that wants to be compressed.

A significant difference between events in story and events in reality resides in focus.  From your own experiences in reality, you know how possible it is to walk through events, mind focused elsewhere.  Ah, the hundreds of times, for instance, when you drove from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles in order to host your classes at the university.  Even as you drove, you were often elsewhere, already inside the lecture or the agenda for the particular classes.

 The result was a sense of arriving safely but with no active sense of how you'd traversed those approximately hundred miles.  Had you, for instance, taken the Route 1 short cut below Ventura, pulling you onto the Coast Highway just before Port Hueneme, or had you stayed on 101 until it became the Hollywood Freeway, then off to the 110 Harbor Freeway?  Portions of you knew, but not all of you was aware on the level of focused presence you relate to final narrative draft.

To be sure, there are times when you are at high-level focus, here in reality, absorbing detail, looking for entry ways to empathy, awareness, understanding.  How wonderful it would be to live 24/7 at such intense awareness.  For certain, you'd not be bored living in such dynamic presence.

But you are human, meaning you are hardwired for distractions of numerous sorts, conflicted by arguing wishes and concerns, fighting to maintain the equivalent of a King Lear-like presence against the insistent demands of your psyche to pay heed to your innermost pompous avatar, Malvolio.

There are numerous times when you're aware of a purposefulness by which you are able to function at the level of muscle memory, being able to do things well without thinking about the performance, much less the desire to perform at better-than-average level.  But a portion of your awareness sends an IM reminding you that performing at muscle-memory-level can't possibly go on indefinitely; even if you are in fact doing well, portions of you are becoming aware of wanting to do things in different ways, portions of you are seeing things you'd not realized before, thus your desire to take them in and understand them.

And what, after all, is understanding but a dialectic of its own in which you make decisions to keep and enhance certain traits while ridding yourself of patterns that don't work to your expectations or satisfaction?

Now we are arrived at the state of vision where action and event in reality are the dramatic equivalent of improvisation, where free association and ad lib behavior are increasing, moving toward becoming the norm.

Among the things you can say about your apparent teleportations from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles and your arrivals at the parking kiosk on South Figueroa, a tad south of Jefferson Boulevard is that you were on some level sufficiently alert that you were in no collisions, caused no collisions or property damage nor broke any traffic laws or violated the social contract.  Even now, well after the fact, you remember incidents when you were wrenched out of your complete awareness to respond reflexively (ah, muscle memory) to some potential hazard.  In fact, in all the thirty-odd years you made the journey, you only once got a traffic citation for speeding and that was at a time when you were focused with deliberation on road and driving conditions because you feared you might be late for an appointment and wished to take some time-saving steps.

This brings you to the point of denouement and summary:  Real time is ad lib, improvised or (and this counts for some points) following a tested formula of behavior where the outcome is not a great candidate for providing surprise.  Dramatic narrative comes as the result of improvisation, replayed with emphasis on ambiguities and flat spots, where tension and/or suspense have been allowed to leak.

Like the parallel lines that meet in geometric infinity or in the dramatic last chapter, reality and drama start as improvisation, competing each with the other for pragmatic prominence.  Just when the worst case scenario appears to be the rule of thumb in life, you see ways to make a dramatic event thought unthinkable begin to come to fruition.  You can regret past actions, attempt to revise them in some compensatory way, sublimate them, bear them as occasions of constant guilt.  You can enjoy past pleasures by trying to provide such pleasures with others, which is to say, share or put on your uniform of altruism.

Reality and drama thrive on awareness, rehearsal, and revision.


O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

The Storyteller Hidden in the Attic

A GPS tracking device takes its abbreviated name from Global Positioning System.  It is a way of  finding an efficient path from one location to another, thanks to some help from satellites orbiting the earth.  Before you had access to such devices on your iPhone, you relied on Google maps.  Before that, thanks to a boyhood fondness to road maps once given as a courtesy to customers of gasoline stations, and before that, to map reading, the one subject in which you excelled during the classes in ROTC you were required to take while an undergraduate.

With that as backstory, you were  not used being lost for long.  You might become disoriented, momentarily at sea, but not for long.  Even then, although you had the ultimate resource of asking for directions, you acted out the behavior attributed to most of your gender, a process it is charitable to call finding your way by the seat of your pants, or instinct.  A boy thing.

Now, thanks to your iPhone, the Maps application, and the Siri application, you use your home location as a default (which can be changed with ease for starting out from someplace other than home), and your intended destination,  A few taps and you are soon guided by the no-nonsense monotone of the Siri application, telling you to proceed for five hundred years before you turn right or left at X Street or Avenue.  This process literally talks you through the turns, alleys, and intersections between you and your destination.

The process is so simple that it inspires you to wonder what it would be like to have a similar application to guide you through some of the turns, roundabouts, passenger lanes, and on-ramps of reality.  You also find yourself wondering if that were the case, would you in some kind of notional or gender-based hard wiring, ignore those directions, preferring to rely on your instincts.

Having thought this far about potential updates on your iPhone GPS applications, you cannot resist thinking about the future time when GPS would guide you through stories you were working on, providing you, as your present GPS devices do, potential alternate routes to physical locations.  Aha, you tell yourself, you'd type in a few basics of your story, then look for a charted out array of potential routes to closure and the emotional state you'd most like the story to evoke in the reader.

 To your credit, you without exception find closure to such speculations by rejecting any kind of mechanical intervention or even help.  One thing for an editor or your agent to suggest something is not clear or overdone or even unnecessary in the extreme, but being told the same thing by a damned iPhone application is too damned much for your gadget-friendly compulsiveness to accept, even in speculative fantasy.

The truth of the matter is that you want and hope to be lost in your stories, even the nonfiction narratives, even in these vagrant blog essays.  You want to get beyond the recognizable landmarks and into Terra incognita.  You want to be lost enough so that the seat-of-the-pants instincts on which you hope to rely are at first sending you WTF messages, Oliver Hardy messages of "Another fine mess you've gotten us into" sorts because you are more interested in unthinkable solutions rather than the most direct approach.

Originality is not a matter of something no one has thought of before.  Chances are, in one way or another, most things have been thought of, a view that is not cynical in the least.  Originality is using an unexpected route to achieve the desired destination.  The GPS will take you from one tangible place to another, sometimes with a kind of dismissive, "Your destination is on your right in five hundred feet."  This may work for finding a restaurant or a residence or a place where you're supposed to give a lecture or be the principal at a book signing, but this is not the kind of closure you want to the circumstances you try to define in your composing modes.

For some weeks in recent times, you've found yourself thinking about the burn ratio, the number of drafts to get a scene, the number of pages to arrive at a keepable page, the number of alternate route you think through or live through or write through to arrive at closure.  A few years ago, when you were most focused on short stories, you made the discovery that the ending or resolution you sought was not always satisfying, leading you to re-think what endings and closure meant to you, leading to additional realizations about how important it is to leave the party while the party is still at a high enough emotional pitch.

So far as you're concerned, embarking on a work is the equivalent of a journey.  You may think you have the destination firm in your vision, but the more you get into the terrain, you might even realize that you have to change your default beginning, a fact that should suggest to you that the ending could be different.  Your goal is to get lost, to become distracted or preoccupied, or worse, frightened.  Often this state and location is a steroidal leap of understanding--this is where you begin, lost, disoriented, thinking you know the destination and the most interesting if not the most direct way of arriving there.

The GPS is the first thing you turn off, opting instead for the same state you inflict, knowingly or not, on your characters--vulnerability.  Now, you are picking up transmissions from the you who is the fabricator, the unreliable narrator, the storyteller you keep hidden in the attic.

Rituals

A ritual is a series of actions, gestures perhaps, and offerings which may be real or symbolic, all performed to achieve a specific goal.  In many rituals, intent is important, in some cases as vital as the specific actions.  The celebrant must wish the outcome with an earnest motive.  Insincere performances of the ritual will undermine the outcome.

The goals of some rituals are simple, straightforward practices directed toward the goal of remembrance.  The thing to be remembered might be a person, an animal, an event.  Some rituals are performed to protect things such as fields in which crops are grown, while other rituals are performed to provide the rain necessary to nourish crops.  Rituals also welcome young persons into  society, neophytes into cults or organizations.  You could consider various stages of education as rituals, degrees paving the way to higher status, from a bachelor of arts or science to a master to doctoral, and even beyond to post-doctoral.

Anthropologists and archaeologists do not often agree, each approaching the other with a suspicion born of cynicism and basic differences in approach, bound by mutual respect for scientific gathering of data, reasoned approaches to drawing inferences, even more reasoned approaches to arriving at conclusions.  Both groups have been gathering data on rituals for a few hundred years, their approaches becoming more refined, their separate revisions of previous conclusions becoming an accepted adjunct to modern practice.

Although we tend to think of ritual in terms of religious or shamanistic terms, there are splendid opportunities for ritual in secular, social, even business contexts.

In its personalized way, completing a manuscript is the result of ritual, where intent is an emphatic presence.  In such cases, intent has potential for a number of turns, there is intent to publish, intent to ratify information (physical or emotional), discovery, justification, entertainment, the common good, propaganda, influence.

You don't approach a potential project with a sense of ritual, but by the time you are well along the way to discovering what the project wants from you and your attempt to measure what the project wants from you, you've noted a distinct effect on your intent.

For the purpose of essay, which is in itself a kind of ritual, you're about to compare something you have some familiarity with against something you have only scant information, nearly all of it from written accounts.  Thus your comparison of writing for discovery with the Snake Dance performed by a clan of the Hopi tribe.  Both rituals are performed with earnestness, both with a specific goal in mind.  Both rituals involve some form of transformative behavior.

When you sit to compose, there are numerous aspects of yourself you feel the need to set on hold, focusing as much as possible on the result of discovery.  What will the characters do?  How will their actions effect them?  How will they feel along the way?  How will they feel after having accomplished or failed to accomplish their goal?  What will you discover from your close associations with the characters?  How will this discovery effect you?

As you understand the goal of the Hopi Snake Dance, the goal is to provide a series of rituals involving the snakes, which are then released at the four cardinal directions, in hopes that they will carry the news to the appropriate deity that the required rituals were performed correctly.  Now, message delivered, the appropriate deity will be pleased and reward the rituals with rain.  At the beginning of the dance, the members of the appropriate clan who will be the dancers, have a dab of ritualized cornmeal placed near each eye bu the clan chieftain, who informs the men that they are no longer men but kachina spirits.  When the dance is ended and the dancers return to the kiva gathering place, the clan chieftain rubs off the corn meal, telling the dancers they are no longer kachina spirits, they are mere men again.

Snake Dances do not always bring rain to the Hopi mesas, but the two times you witnessed the dance, as you drove away from the gathering, the windshield of your car was splattered with drops which became more of a downpour and, then, tangible rain.  Coincidence?  By which question you mean, did the dance produce the rain or was it the result of atmospheric conditions that would have produced the rain under any circumstances?  The sceptic in you enjoys the argument that the rain would have appeared, dance or no.  The aspect of you fond of the Hopi culture wants to believe those kachnina dancers drilled it.  In most matters, you have internalized this schism.  You lean toward scientific explanations for phenomena.  Your walls have at least six Hopi dolls on them, two Navajo fetish dolls, and one totemic carving from the Haida of the Pacific Northwest.

Working on a manuscript, sometimes even a seemingly inconsequential book review, you find your involvement carrying over to those remarkable moments where you are active in pursuit of sleep or emerging from having been asleep, almost to the point in each case where you can feel the gears in your brain shift from state to state.  You are well aware of the project at hand, often to the point of composing lines of it in your mind.

You are aware of the difference in composition in waking and sleeping stages, the sleeping stage taking on a greater range of association, even to the point of bringing in individuals you know have no rational purpose in the narrative.  Other times, you find yourself dealing with characters who have strange names or goals, names and desires completely foreign to you.  Coming out of the dream, you are often reminded of the chief of the kachina clan, reminding his dancers they are human again, no longer spirit messengers.

You are awake again, you tell yourself.  Remember you are a mere human, no longer a writer. Then, you settle in to see what, if anything, you've learned from this unexpected near-dream, actual dream, and waking states.  Some of the things you set aside when you sit to compose are back with you, the thought of coffee, for instance, the quick consultation with your appetite to see what degree of breakfast will attract you.

Much depends on the meanings you've sorted out from your cogitations and wild, dream-state rides.  Coffee can be slurped computer side.  A toasted raisin muffin, slathered with peanut butter and strawberry jam or marmalade can be snacked on while sitting before the screen.

Was the ritual of intent successful?  Was it strong enough?  Were you sincere enough about wanting a result?

Autobiographical Writings: The Self revised

In case you hadn't considered the matter for some time, yesterday's observations served to remind you how large a part autobiography plays in your attempts to define the worlds about you and delve with greater certainty into the worlds within you.

At one time in your life, about the time of your late twenties and early thirties, you sought ways of making a living from your writing.  Now, some years later, you seek to make writing from your living, which is to say you seek ways to allow the influences of experience free access to your inner processes.

Autobiography is in fact a biased approach to rearranging the events of your life, imparting understanding, reason, insight into places where, in actual event, they were lacking to the degree you'd hoped. Fiction is a greater embellishment, an approach where characters already function at levels you'd had to fight your way through and are now faced with problems and decisions more in keeping with the plateaus you are impatient to achieve now.

In short, you are impatient to the degree you see your time running out.  Of course you often forget that from the moment you began trying to take some charge of the landscape you understood to be you, time was running out, could in theory and actuality have run out at any moment.  

A you,residing in some kind of existential denial,once had expectations of moving ahead or forward in progress on the basis of your past experiences.  These, you reasoned, were surely enough to keep you moving while at the same time taking in the sights.

Nights spent traversing the deserts, bound to fabled destinations where you would encounter literary experiences and destiny, were filled with an anticipation so intense that you often missed the shadows, the phases of the moon, the lights arriving from stars that had burned out and died hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years ago.  

Now, nights are more apt to be spent here at your keyboard or traversing the neighborhood for your evening walk, awed and amazed by the distances of stations in the universe, distances between things understood and barely fathomed, stunned by the sheer number of things necessary to be learned and to keep yourself aware of.

A book you've written contains some three hundred seventy-five terms related in one way or another to the craft of relating story, things as straightforward and practical as Mark Twain's essay, "How to Tell a Story," and such stretchers as synecdoche and verb tenses to be used in interior monologue.  You could, with enough time and ale or wine, argue how any given scene in a dramatic narrative requires all three hundred seventy-five elements and the possibility of even more.

Enter the humbling and rewarding task of revision, which helps you see the original vision and have a potential for capturing it with words and concepts so that it will have a similar effect of the light being seen in the desert, coming from distant stars.

Autobiography is a form of revising your life, not in the sense of altering its beginnings, middles, and endings, rather by rephrasing it, you might get a better glimpse of the light source you once were, what changes you have endured, what your experiences meant and what they now mean.

As a writer and teacher, you have the opportunity to replay aspects of your understanding, subjecting it to differing points of view as represented by your characters, interpreting your experiences on a wider spectrum that you were able to grasp when first presented with the experience.

This is by no means an ambition to relive your life in order to change outcomes, instead a desire to see if you've missed understandings and appreciations, in particular as they relate to your motives.

Two of your favored landscapes are seaside, in particular the Pacific Coast from about the Big Sur northward to the beaches along the Oregon Coast, and the wide swath of desert roughly between Los Angeles and Santa Fe.  They are both of incalculable beauty and variety.  One is no better than the other; each is a distinct personality, a distinct set of potentials, waiting to be seen and understood.

You wish to travel your inner landscapes as you have traveled these two settings, a pilgrim in search of light and understanding and potential.

Working up: From Resume to Curriculum Vitae

In the search for compelling, vibrant characters, we tend to focus on the effect of their goals upon them rather than the cause that brought about the goal. Your own holy trinity, who are they?  What do they want, and what are they willing to do to achieve their goal?  This is enhanced by a number of modern acting approaches, which recognize your trinity then add to it a fourth, valuable question:  Why do they want it now?

Goal is of major importance, but something subtle and of impending importance may be lost if we are too literal in our focus or if, having discovered the motivating, driving force behind the goal, we fail to look at an important fact, staring at us like an outsider.

The characters with the strongest resources to portray leading, front-rank persons are those who tend to be loners.  Their remoteness is not of necessity from a lack of social skills as much as from their preoccupation with something to which they attach a higher priority.  

We may not write about it directly, finding it convenient to rely on inference, nevertheless it is helpful to know why John is so interested in astronomy or poetry or becoming a chef or musician, what it is about Phil that causes him to sneak off to watch old Fred Astaire movies on YouTube and Netflix, why Mary is so determined to live an outdoor life, why Joanne is willing to spend so many hours a week after her forty-hour job, practicing her technique on an instrument as off the radar as a lute or banjo.

These individuals are all hypotheticals, invented to serve as example, and done so in your belief that a character is best described by action, which includes agendas and activities, also by what that character is willing to sacrifice in order to pursue a goal.

The character who is pulled away from social practice and engagement is often anything but antisocial, perhaps even aware of the cost, but also too caught up in the distraction to be able to moderate the activity or focus.  Such individuals can emerge as odd or marginal, thus the need to make them even more engaged in their remoteness.  Now they are mysterious, their appearance of being driven not so much a psychological anomaly--although it is-- as a reminder to us how important focus is.

Malcolm Gladwell's study, Outliers,  supplies us with a basic approach:  Spend ten thousand hours focused on a thing, say writing or dancing or drawing.  That's the equivalent of nearly fourteen consecutive months, with no time off for sleeping.  Ten thousand hours of concentrated effort of the sort an actor makes, learning her craft or a writer, writing a book.  These efforts remind us, sometimes in the negative, guilt-producing way, of the lack of focus we exert to pursuing our dreams.  Enter another subtle digression here:  these dreams of ours may be expressed or secretly held.

Example: You wish to expand your abilities as a writer.  Many of your friends are going to grad school, starting careers, entering committed romantic relations, some starting families.  You maintain contact with some, but inevitable bridges are burned.  Some of the jobs you take prove not to be socially acceptable to some of your friends or as aspects of you having adopted Peter Pan as a role model.  Your resume begins to present a picture of you as an anomaly, suspect in the conventional job market.  

When questions are asked about such entries as "Managed concession facilities in cities throughout the San Joaquin Valley," there is little tolerance.  No one who discovers this description means you worked baseball throw and guess-your-weight booths at carnivals will take you seriously.  

You, on the other hand, take yourself seriously, acknowledging your risk, experiencing the life as an outlier, your toolkit brimming with bright, mischievous, unusable worlds, a memory humming with the energy of hundreds of books read, hundreds of manuscripts written, hundreds more of both waiting to be read and written.

Thus your growing awareness that you must see characters as persons who gave up opportunities to be conventional in order to become individuals.

Thus one day you sit in the offices of a man named Lou, who says he can't get over how the mail order copy you wrote for him resulted in his being able to sell the six hundred fifty two-volume sets of the short stories of Henry James another man named Bentley sold him under the false pretenses that the James books were filled with the nineteenth century equivalent of pornography.  Thus he shows you a list of book titles Bentley's mail order consultation firm swears will sell at a huge profit.  Thus he asks you how many of these titles you can write and how soon.  Thus, six months later, he asks if you can work any faster, and when you say you're already working pretty fast, he wonders if you have any friends who are writers, and when you say a few, he asks you how you'd like to become an editor.

After a time, you have that to put on your resume, in addition to the management of concession facilities throughout the San Joaquin Valley of Central California.

Some years later, you are sitting in the dining area of the St. Regis Hotel in New York, across an elaborate tea service presided over by a stiff, cranky woman you were advised always to call Mrs. Meyer, no matter what she told you.  "What,"  she asks you, while handing you a tea cup filled with a smokey gray infusion, "is so special about you, and why should I hire you?"

You tell her she should hire you because you have good taste and can spot good publishing prospects.

She asks you if these good prospects will--her term--"earn out," by which she means recover their investment costs.  You tell her you can guarantee the good taste but not the earning out, to which she reminds you she will be hiring you for both.

You stand, thank her for the meeting, nod to her associates, and tell her it was a pleasure meeting her.

"Call me Helen,"  she says.

"Does that mean I'm hired, Helen?"

"What did they--"  she hitches her head to her associates.  "--tell you about addressing me?"

She was, of course, testing you.  But the thing she didn't tell you was that you were reporting to them.

By the time you ran your course with them, your resume was beginning to acquire a panache worthy of a curriculum vitae.  

You Say Po-tay-to and I Say Po-tot-oh

When you lived in Los Angeles, there were at least two delicatessens you could visit for the delicious combination of comfort food and comfort atmosphere.  The most favored of these, Linny's in Beverly Hills, was the most homelike of all, thanks to the owner's awareness that his daughter, now in law school, was a classmate of two of your friends who, dissatisfied with their career choices, decided to give The Law a try.

The owner, a Viennese, tended to favor a style of cooking a few turns of the cultural screw away from the preferences in which you were grounded, thus an ongoing discussion about such matters as what constitutes the true matzoh ball, famed from matzoh ball soup, and what is the cabbage soup most approaching the ideal cabbage soup.  Both you and Max Krauthammer had differing ideals in mind when speaking of either. 

In such matters as preparation of brisket or short ribs, there was a collegial accord which extended to most of the items in the sandwich menu.  Although you tended to favor Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray Tonic to wash down corned beef or pastrami sandwiches and Max touted the Dr. Brown's Cream Soda, this was no serious matter of contention.  

When you were of a more composed frame of being, you'd tend to order the brisket, even the potato latkes with applesauce, and "Keep the Cel-Ray tonics coming."  When you were in a more contentious mood, you'd order either the cabbage or matzoh ball soup.

From your father and his mother, you saw the received standard matzoh ball as something which, as your father put it, "would break the plate, should it fall from your spoon or fork."  From Max's cultural POV, a matzoh ball is a light, fluffy consistency on a par with sponge cake.

While we're on the subject, your father's mother, who became your last word on the subject, made a cabbage soup that had tartness at its essence to the point where she would secure a quart or so of sauerkraut, wring it dry of its brine, then place it lovingly in a stock made from simmering of plump tomatoes and fresh, crisp cabbage.  Max, true to his own visions of how a cabbage soup should greet the palate, spoke fondly of the discreet amount of brown sugar, the presence of yellow raisins, and only enough lemon juice to, as he put it, "wake up" the cabbage.

On occasion, when you were in a more benign mood--benign-but-hungry--Max would have a tasting cup of the cabbage soup or a small matzoh ball adrift in a dram or so of chicken stock.

Another feature of Linny's deli was the presence of your favored waitress, Belle, who was the epitome of a delicatessen waitress, concerned, edgy, opinionated.  Belle knew what was going on in the kitchen, which is to say, she saw which of the specials and available options were fresh, savory, worth eating.  "Manny has made a remarkable noodle kiegel,"  she'd advise you.  Had she opted for the more neutral noodle pudding, she would not have been Belle.  

"Kugle," you'd say.  "Oh," she'd say.  "I keep forgetting that about you.  Your people are from the kugle side of Europe," her accent of the word for pudding on a par with a racial epithet.  And yes, she was the sort of waitress who, after you'd given your order, say a pastrami on rye with an extra side of Cole slaw, she'd feel free to say, "You have something against the stuffed derma, maybe?"

The only Los Angeles deli you visit these days is Art's, where some of the waitresses have an edge, but there is almost complete accord with the various presentations of the various dishes you have ordered.

There is no such cultural draw for you in Santa Barbara, but the Italian Deli on De La Guerra at Laguna frequently calls out to you when you are in the neighborhood, causing you, as it did today, to make an improvised move into the parking lot, your taste buds beginning to slather for the super deluxe torpedo with everything.

The trouble today was unexpected and delightful, beginning with your order of the turkey super deluxe and the server wanting to know why today of all days you'd decided to switch from your normal order of the full deli option, particularly when she'd begun piling salami cotto and copa on the bun.  "I suppose you're going to switch to the orange cheese."

Whereupon another of the servers jumped in with, "I wanna see the day he takes orange cheese."

You enjoyed a full five minutes of animated conversations about such choices as mustard?  Deli mustard?  Peppers?  "Thirty years, he's coming here and you have to ask that?"  

Such thoughts are weaving connections among themselves when, a bit later in the afternoon, you take yourself, computer and note pad, to your favorite coffee shop, thrilled at its relative emptiness.  Your order placed, you make your way to your favorite table, mercifully unoccupied at this time of day, and are able to connect your laptop to your favorite extension cord.

Coffee and ice water delivered, you ponder the process of how fiction helps remove randomness from narrative and gives the appearance of a more orderly, structured universe with nearly all of its inhabitants somehow united in the mutual quest for survival and, thus, a community of agenda in which story seems to hover.

Within moments after the first round of such thoughts, you are set upon by two middle-aged men who inform you that you, a complete stranger to them, are needed for your objectivity, whereupon the three of you move from conversation to heated discussion about the nature of objectivity, the relative impossibility of objectivity, and the particular vulnerability of objectivity in a city the size of Santa Barbara.

Which in its labyrinthine way brings you back to the chaos of reality when measured against the determinism of fiction.  This last comparison earned for you an accusation that you were either a professor of philosophy or of sociology, which devolved into more small town determinism when the barista, who has a master's degree in sociology, informed the men your field was literature and that the newest customer to enter was in fact a professor of sociology.

You'd come to the coffee shop in the first place because of the two-hour window of no parking in place on your side of the street and you with no place to park.  By this time, you could and did leave the coffee shop with reasonable expectations of finding a convenient place to park at home.  Thus you never did discover what the matter was where you were to be an objective judge.

There is a good chance you'd have recused yourself on the grounds of needing such objectivity as you're able to define and muster to cope with internal issues of your own.