Evocation

The actor who has learned to evoke emotions in dramatic situations or, indeed, to evoke drama in static situations, is exponentially beyond the actor who merely describes feelings by uses of standardized gestures or vocal inflections.

And yet.

And yet, the trained actor uses gestures, sometimes seemingly imperceptible ones: the blink of an eye, the shrug of a shoulder, the hunching of the body, the lowering of muscle tension in the face. The trained actor uses voice every bit as inflectively as the lesser trained actor. Witness the trained actor, Peter O'Toole, in a recent film performance, Venus, where he stands on an empty stage, of an outdoor theater, addressing an "audience" of empty seats, covered with the fallen leaves of winter, reciting the Shakespeare sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day. Pure evocation of a myriad of emotions and depth, where the evocation triumphs gloriously over the husky, sensual timbre of O'Toole's voice to the point where, watching him, the last thig you're thinking is, Here is a man who knows how to render Shakespeare. You are totally involved in the character, of whom you are thinking, Here is a man who loves what he does.

The same potential for dimension awaits the writer who understands and capitalizes on the difference between evoke and describe. Said theoretical writer need not be a novelist or short story writer; the likes of David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Barbara Tuchman, splendid historians all, were able to move beyond mere description to evoke, bring forth, the places in which their subjects come to life, presenting words, in many cases the actual words of their subjects, but in a manner similar to O'Toole's performance in what was essentially a romantic comedy.

Evocation is the difference between drama and journalism, between humor and comedy; it introduces the tinge of feeling into the atmosphere, turning it from a road map to a microcosm.

Acocrdingly, evocation is the texture of the unsaid imparted to the said. Doctor Livingston, I presume, is splendid on its face, but beyond its face is the intended and received irony, intended by Henry Morton Stanley, received all these years later by us.

How do I approach evocation?

You approach it by observing the subtext of the situation, which is the dominant effect you wish to convey. Two people bidding one another a seemingly casual farewell is rich with the potential for evocation if you know, as the two people know, that they will never see one another again. At the final hearing in an acrimonious divorce proceeding, one of the couple may fling the challenge, Get a life of your own, a challenge rich in evocation if we understand that the challenger feels bitter about the outcome of the division of community property. A final parting in a hospital or hospice, has lovely permutations for evocation. See you around, maybe, takes on a meaning that reaches out to embrace the reader with the emotion passing between the two individuals.

Does evocation always reside in dialogue?

Nah; sometimes it emerges from details, from settings, from the vision of a plate of ripe figs on a table, a half drunk cup of coffee on a desk, a vase of iris on a window sill, from the expression on the face of a person in a photo, from a close-up of a pair of hands in an attitude. (yes, hands certainly do convey an attitude--if they want to, or if you want them to.)

Evocation then becomes the shared humanity of feelings and the simultaneous eye of the beholder, and you already know that can evoke a cynicism toward this thing we call the shared humanity. Can evocation go over the top? Can and does. So the only way to proceed is the trip through the mine field wearing snow shoes in which you write as you feel and feel as you write, knowing full well some Anonymous will call you out on your blog, write a letter to the editor about you, complain to the dean about your insensitivity. If you are lucky, Hillary will call you a elitist, and some other blog lurker will remind you that you lumpen liberals don't have clue. Your security in all this is knowing that you have evoked something in them that they may not be willing to face.

Clue

Used as a noun, a clue is a guideline bit of information that will lead to understanding of a concept or the solution of a mystery or puzzle.

Working as a verb, clue informs someone or some ones with information that will allow participation with the same equipment as everyone else. Having a clue is of a piece with tossing in an ante in a poker game; it means you will be dealt cards with which to effect the strongest possible hand or, to stretch the analogy, to maximize the potential for achieving the goal.

The ultimate destiny of a clue is to provide access to information, as in Get a clue! Armed with a clue, one might experience the power of having the solution to an enigma, as indeed Edward Elgar experienced toward the end of the nineteenth century when he followed through on the clues allowing him to complete his opus 36 for orchestra, The Enigma Variations.


Having no clue--being clueless--suggests an extreme naif, abroad in a landscape where many if not all others have a clue, a sense of direction, purpose, a vector of information to pursue, possibly even an American flag lapel pin.

Accordingly, you might ask, should the writer begin a journey with no clue, setting forth with no clear destination in mind? Should the writer begin with some hypothesis, some propellant, some what if, or should the writer step off the edge of the dock, not only expecting but in fact inviting wet feet for his troubles?

Dangers and paradoxes, also lovely words, abound. Should the writer eschew the clueless narrator? This would mean no Mr. Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day, and what a pity that would be, in no small measure because, pity him though we do, we also like him to the point of seeing the armies of clueless about us. We would also have to come to terms with Bartelby, of scrivener fame, wondering if he were merely intransigent, passive, devious, manipulative, or clued in entirely, a splendid representative of Melville's vision of man in an urbanized setting.

Is the naive narrator to be trusted any more than the narrator we recognize as unreliable? Is cluelessness acceptable? Should we make a grail of The Clue and seek it with all our passionate heart?

Does the clue trump the detail in our ongoing quest to find our way through the textures of thought, experience and regret that form the landscape of or daily life? Or is clue the key to the recognition of which details to cherish and follow?

Friction

Friction is one of the great, generating forces in drama, an observation that also recognizes the experience as an integral part of the human genome. Understanding the application and consequences of friction is a basic tool of the writer.

Friction is indeed the rubbing of one's heel against the back of an unwieldy shoe, bound under those circumstances to produce a blister. Friction is the rubbing of one individual against another, equally bound under some circumstances to produce a blister of attitude if not of actual dermal irritation. On other occasions the rubbing of one individual against another may produce a condition known variously as frottage, humping, serious arousal, or for the elderly, funny arousal.

Friction may be the rubbing of agendas as well as body parts. It may be consensual or the result of intransigence allowed to stew and simmer; it may manifest itself within one individual using as a template all the permutations I have already noted.

We create friction when we rub out palms together in anticipation of merely to warm our hands.

We create friction when we rub the back of our neck while working toward a decision.

We create friction when we rub our thumb over the second and index fingers of a hand, a sign universally interpreted to mean send money. Now.

We create friction when we act on an agenda of our own devising, to the exclusion of or a deliberate ignorance of the agenda of one or more others.

We feel the effects of friction when a relationship, job, social experience, or social taboo closes in, cutting off escape paths.

We feel the effects of friction when we attempt to be the social or literary equivalent of a blister pad, using ourself as a buffer between two frictional forces, with the frequent result of experiencing a blister on both sides.

There are numerous things we may do to ameliorate or remove friction, sometimes by using a balm or lubricant, other times by using the balm or lubricant of tact, other times yet by processing information from our antenna that warns us of forthcoming rubbing.

Such is the nature of human participation: friction when applied with the proper intent may produce the tingle of sensual pleasure, the crackle of inspiration, the reverberation of intellectual stimulus. Even the, time enters as a factor. Too much tingle can actually produce irritation. When improperly applied over a span of time, friction may produce blister or callous, one the traces of irritation, the latter an armor against the agent of cause.

We must exercise great care as humans who write to rub up against the things that produce tingles and to avoid contact with those that produce armor.

The moral is that we want to tingle, not to be callous.

Invocation

Perhaps my fond regard for books printed and bound in India comes from my fondness for and close association with the middle generation of pulp magazines, the iconic Haldeman-Julius Blue Books, and the first generation of the massmarket or paperback book. Whatever the source, I think fondly of the pulpy text paper, the sewing of the bound signatures reminding me of my own early attempts at sewing, the covers more reminiscent of a fast food hamburger than a book. Books published in India frequently begin with some invocation to some deity, frequently to Ganesha, sometimes to Saraswati. Praise to Ganesha, the text will begin, shifting immediately to whatever subject the book addresses, suggesting that the invocation has worked and we may now go secular, Ganesha or Saraswati or some other divine being having delivered up the connective tissue to make the reading of the text a benefit for the reader.

Perhaps my favorite of the T.S. Eliot Quartets is Little Gidding, this because in it, Eliot, no stranger to prayer and invocation, attends a cemetery:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time...

Close to exquisite in his description of the state beyond time, space, and causation the creative person must seek when venturing into a new work, Eliot encounters a ghost who, in my view, has to be the ghost of a poet I have long admired, perhaps as much as I admire any poet. No, not Hopkins, not Sexton, nor Thomas, although I dote on them. Not Chaucer, into whom I read so much and from whom I draw so much more. Not even Ezra Pound, whom, his anti-Semitism and archness to the contrary not withstanding, I follow reluctantly at times but doggedly. I speak here of Willie--William Butler Yeats, brought to life for me for the first time by a mentor from my university days, a man who knew him, explained him to me in a way that made sense to my callow nineteenth year. Meeting Yeats thus, Eliot is now free to get on about the understanding and connection he seeks in the very act of writing the poem.

Earlier invocations from writers may be seen as wanting an okay from a divine being, a kind of cosmic sign-off on a task or venture to be undertaken. If we track back such remarkable ancients as Hesiod or Homer, we may find source or contemporary theory that the Muses, those daughters of Zeus, were more capricious than we might have imagined, and since I am dancing around with the capricious nature of such sources can imagine Yeats, who had among other things a sense of humor, thinking it would be fun to have Eliot on, possibly even by suggesting to Eliot that he write a series of poems about cats. Oh, well.

Hesiod and Homer did not begin their careers wanting to practice the narrative arts and may have been led to it by the Muses thinking it would help with their farming ventures. What a surprise.

Which is the point of all this; these events are freighted on the potential for surprise no matter if one ventures forth invoking Ganesha or Saraswati, putting Hebrew letters on one's forehead, or going secular and giving a nod to the forces of inspiration. No matter what wireless service one uses, the results are the same. When thought stops and inspiration takes hold, grab on for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride on steroids.

Fast Boats and Slow Politicians

You can do it with a hyphen.

Change a noun into a verb.

Sometimes, you don't even need the hyphen; just go ahead and use the noun as though it conveyed purpose, inertia, agenda.

The example I'm thinking of now is a combination of an adjective, swift, with an object, boat. Swift boat. Ordinarily, that evokes an image of some yare, fleet craft, plying its way through the waters. In recent years, we have associated the construct with the military service of a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, a candidate who at one point served as a command officer on a swift boat, a fifty-foot, all aluminum craft. An adjective plus a noun.

By adding a hyphen to the adjective noun combination, a wealthy Texas Republican turned the noun to a verb; he swift-boated John Kerry by alleging that Kerry's military service and decorations were based on a series of lies and deceptions, thus undercutting his qualifications to be POTUS, presumably because he was a wealthy Texas Republican, although the wealth and Texas domicile may not inform his motives.

Said wealthy Texas Republican was instrumental in forming SBVT, Swift Boat (still a noun) Veterans for Truth, which is in many ways a hoot because the truth this organization sought was the truth of an imaginary fictional world where individuals performed in accordance with a different set of reality boundaries. SBVT was so successful in creating a fictional impression that others, often but not necessarily wealthy Republicans, saw it as a means for undercutting the progress of a noun (person, place, or thing) seen as contrary to their own agenda.

Journalists and TV talking head sorts soon pounced on this tactic, revising history, as a means of confronting nouns with agendas that do not seem in accordance with their own cherished or financially held beliefs. Accordingly, Charles Darwin, his theories of evolution and natural selection, to name but one example, was swift-boated.

This is all prologaminous to the swift-boating I address, an anomalous swift-boating to be sure, a lovely example of post hoc ergo propter hoc in action. The perpetrators in this swift-boating are not wealthy Texas Republicans, they are literary critics and academics. Their target, John Steinbeck, whom they accuse of rampant sentimentality, the effect of which, they argue, is a pernicious on all of literature and all of our collective psyche. They have also gone after Jane Austen, liking her to a one-trick pony who knows only social satire, although they would never dare say such a thing about Evelyn Waugh, because he smoked big fat cigars and said disparaging things about Labourites and children.

Steinbeck is seen as enjoying too much the denizens of Tortilla Flat and Sweet Thursday, of making Rose of Sharon Joad too empathetic, of having Tom Joad's famed soliloquy go on a beat too long, of being sympathetic to Lenny and George, of knowing which heart string to tug. As a consequence of such things, Mr. Steinbeck will be around for some time, far longer than the judgments of the critics who took with such eclat to jumping on the bulk of his work as though it were a funeral pyre.

As to the wealthy Texas Republicans and other swift-boaters, who will also likely be with us for some time because of their embalming-while-alive with the bile of conservatism and troglodyte ideology: Can we honestly say that we are better now then we would have been had the SCOUS not ruled as it did on Bush v. Gore or for that matter, if the young Swift boat lieutenant had become POTUS

If evolution in literary matters continues without interference from book burners and intransigent critics, we will undoubtedly have Mr. Steinbeck in our midst for some time; we can only hope that political evolution follows the paths of strength rather than fear.

Lunch

We are sitting in a rather splendid working-class Mexican restaurant in Carpinteria, its succulent and tasty dishes matching the concern of the owner and his wife, who hover, asking if everything is all right to the point where both Conrad and I exclaim, "Formidable!" Whereupon the patron demands to see Conrad's license, lest he have to pay a fine for serving beer to a minor. The well-intended humor puts us in a rather boyish mood which lasts until Conrad remembers something, dips into the pocket of his rumpled Madras jacket, and extracts a print-out of an email from Chris Buckley, to Conrad's eldest son, whom I have taken to calling BC3 Conrad's portrait, a charcoal of the elder Buckley was a vibrant likeness which Buckley in life enjoyed and kept in his study. Chris reported that the portrait was placed above the Buckley casket at the wake, then remarks, Aren't we lucky to have such splendid fathers--please send my love to your Dad. It is a quiet, lovely moment, and we are both silent while allowing it to sink in, my own thoughts taking a contrapuntal path, first of all to Jake, my own father whom I feel fortunate to have had, but also to the fear that if Conrad and I remain silent and contemplative much longer, we will edge over into the terrain of the maudlin, muddying the rest of our time together. An immediate search and rescue mission is launched i my mind.

"Listen" I say, as one can only say to a friend, "You've got to stop doing those portraits of people you care about. You did John Steinbeck and Christopher Isherwood, and Jose Ferrer and Kenneth Rexroth, and look what happened. They're all dead."

He regards me for a moment, fumbles in his Madras, extracts a trail of tidbits he has torn from various magazines and newspapers, and a black felt-tipped pen, whereupon he seizes a napkin and before long my scraggly eyebrows begin to appear in a likeness exquisite enough to delight any voodoo practitioner. "Stop!" I protest loudly, my hand covering my stomach. "Already I can feel trouble brewing."

El Patron is over in a moment. "Everything is bien?"

"This kid," I say, indicating Conrad. "Este nino. Un cuarandero."

"Hokay," says El Patron, "So long as it is not the food."

A Modest Proposal

Latest figures for trade books published in America (data from Publishers Weekly) project 400,000 new titles for 2008, which works out to 75,000 + titles a week. This figure does not address reprints or revisions; nor does it address self-published works or indeed the fact that the ratio of book readers to population in general remains about the same. The numbers surely do not reflect a growing tendency of Americans to read, rather it speaks to the increasing number of titles read by those who do read copiously.

With so many new books being published each week, the relatively small space available for reviews becomes an issue here because many of the better book reviewers already have gigs, contributing with some regularity to the publications that use their work. The pay is not grand by any stretch, mostly a labor of love. For me, after all these many years of work in the trenches of book reviewing, there is still the kick that trumps fees--the kick of being give a copy of a book you'd have bought anyway, then being paid to write about it.

That said, and having been made aware of the so-called review process for books sold on Amazon dot com and similar sites, I offer the modest proposal of a Flickr-equivalent for book reviewers, where one can post book reviews in a similar manner as individuals with dreams of being Margaret Bourke-White and Annie Liebowitz, and Robert Mapplethorpe, and William Eggleston or Stephen Shore can post their snapshots and say they have their art available for public viewing on Da Internet.

Such proposal will gladden the hearts of those who wish to democratize art instead of supporting much less understanding it. The proposed site, Reviewr, can give each of us the chance of venting his inner critic's spleen on the likes of Margaret Drabble and Don DeLilo with the impunity of the critic's protective coating without having to pass licensing tests or demonstrating hand-eye coordination or, indeed, anything approaching judgment.

It was Emerson, I believe, who wrote to the matter of each of us, when seeing some superb essay or hearing some well-observed bon mot or apothegm, can nod in agreement with the coiner for having intuited our very vision exactly as we had done at the banquet given us by ourself in recognition.

Such is the nature now of criticism that one is able to render a judgment not having read the work in question but by carefl consideration of the Google apercu of the work.