Monthly Archives: October 2012

October 11, 2012 · 2:26 pm

When wicked bureaucracy and monstrous evil conjoin–“The Cabin in the Woods”

My last post kicked off the Halloween season with what I regarded as an appropriately frightening tale, A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest.”  Nevertheless, a friend of mine said, “Yes, it’s a good post, but it’s not about something like a true horror book or movie.  Why don’t you let your hair down and write about something that’s just-for-fun scary and not about so serious a set of moral points?”  So, warning my readers ahead of time with a “spoiler alert” (I will be giving away the end of the movie), I’ve undertaken to write a shorter post than usual on “The Cabin in the Woods.”

This post is probably going to be one of the shortest I’ve ever written, for the simple reason that though I am moderately well-trained in other areas of theater, I’ve never taken a film course or been more than a casual film buff.  Generally, I respond to movies through their plot devices, character sketches, and most obvious symbolism, as if they were stories written down on the page.  Thus, I claim no special status in my remarks about a recent horror-film-with-a-difference which I’ve seen, though I’m proud of myself for even attempting to write down a few observations on the movie.

When a friend of mine who is as clueless as I am about horror films read the blurb on the back of the DVD, she was persuaded that this was a genuinely funny movie, one which two horror film cowards could view with the assurance that they would laugh their way through whatever silly shadows cast by ghostly hands might appear.  After all, the blurb said something about a group of producers/directors who are behind the scenes of a scary encounter in a “haunted” house, set up apparently to pull a joke on unsuspecting visitors to/buyers of the property.  This, we felt, was going to be good.

Once we started actually watching, there were a few moments of mild humor of a sophomoric sort,  but the wittiest rejoinders were always delivered by an engaging pothead who was one of a group of five young people on their way to the cabin for a vacation in the woods.  If there had been enough humor in the movie, it would’ve worked better, or if the pothead had had more lines and been less in the shadows of the action, it might’ve been a better movie.  Or maybe given my rank amateur status as a viewer of this kind of film, I have no right to complain.  But I have seen movies which were both scary and extremely clever and artistic with their humor, such as “The Shining” (“Hi, honey, I’m home!”) and “An American Werewolf in London” (the dialogues with the friend who comes back from the dead, and the main character waking up in the wolves’ cage at the zoo) and I was perhaps spoiled for something as full of the one-trick pony joke as “The Cabin in the Woods” from the start.  The joke appears to be that while the adventurous, heroic characters are to be killed off, the inaptly named “virgin” and the pothead are meant to survive, at least to the end of the film, after having been apparently killed off more than once.  (I’ve commented on humor plus horror as a workable combination in plays, films, and books before, in my post of August 20, 2012 entitled “‘What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?’–Alexander Pope”.)

The best dramatic parts of the film are the sections when the producers/directors of the putative “reality tv show” appear, as it gradually becomes apparent that they are more than they seem:  the dramatic tension, such as it is, builds and is invested in watching them trying to kill off the characters.  But a large part of the dramatic tension is lost when it becomes apparent that they really are “out for blood,” and suddenly the movie becomes just another horror film in a list of many, and one feels it’s probably not one of the best.

One of the most effective qualities of the filming which I feel I can responsibly comment on (as a person largely disinclined to watch horror films) is the extreme darkness of the scenes.  It’s effective in the scenes shot in the woods at night and in the cabin not solely because of any obligation to a supposed realism, but because as Henry James reminded us in writing about his “potboiler” “The Turn of the Screw,” using the reader’s (or viewer’s) mind to half-invent the horrors you want to portray is at least half the battle.  The zombies are very bumpy and reddish-black and messy and not backlit, which helps more than actual pale faces and drooping, stained features would have.  And by the time “all hell breaks loose” and all the other fantastic monsters and so forth appear, one is more or less preoccupied solely with watching the two surviving characters try to keep their heads above water (and there is a water scene) amidst what seem like incredible odds.

The end of the movie, with the two surviving characters sharing a joint while the world ends, is engaging, but not really believable on some subconscious “okay, I’ve seen all this horror, now deliver the chilling punchline about how some trace of evil has managed to survive” or conversely “now everything’s all right again and we can all draw a sigh of relief” level.  As noted before, I’m not an expert on horror films, but the utter devastation in the final scene and the sort of shoulder shrug response of “oh well, let’s just get high and forget about it” is mysteriously unsatisfying, though certainly one has to admit there is a certain justice in the two characters quietly enjoying a joint and accepting that the challenge has been too much for them.

This is about where I stand on the movie “The Cabin in the Woods,” though I am interested in hearing what those with either more film experience or more experience of horror films in particular have to say:  basically, I think the most innovative and creative part of the whole movie is its premise, its main idea, that is, that some group of competitive, driven button pushers somewhere is sitting on the powder keg of hell and keeping it under control, and yet that they have constantly to function within the idea of an “acceptable loss margin,” which consists of other people.  Have you seen the movie?  What do you think?

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October 9, 2012 · 7:59 pm

A humanly chilling tale for Halloween–A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest”

A. S. Byatt’s tale “The Thing in the Forest” from Little Black Book of Stories is a deceptively docile story about perspective, childhood, and nightmare (both the everyday and the fantastic kinds).  By and large, what produces the at least initially docile tone is the series of simple declarative sentences, often beginning with “the” or “there” as in any children’s well-told story with its fiats and “there once was.”  Defying the conventional writers’ wisdom about varying sentence structure, for a lot of the story these sentences march in order, simply telling what was the case without apology or intricacy, though there is intricacy in the implications attendant on the “simple” facts so posed.  This means of telling reinforces the factuality from a childlike perspective, at the same time as it heightens the mystery of “the thing in the forest.”  Just as the two little girls who are the main characters wonder if their WWII evacuation to the countryside is a punishment or a treat–and many children in England were sent into the country at the time to keep them safe–so a sense of uncertainty about the terror itself causes them to separate willingly after they “see” the thing in the forest attached to the countryhouse where they are staying.

The “thing” too is simply described, with only a gentle introduction and a slight variation from the previously repetitive sentence structure:  “Did they hear it first or smell it first?  Both sound and scent were at first infinitesimal and dispersed.  Both gave the impression of moving in–in waves–from the whole perimeter of the forest.  Both increased very slowly in volume, and both were mixed, a sound and a smell fabricated of many disparate sounds and smells.”  In the rest of the description, which tells what smells exactly and sounds precisely the thing is composed of, the fantastic is at war with the flowing pace of the language, not elevated or unusual, but causing a concatenation of images for the reader to be appalled by.  The “thing” is apparently not aware of or not after the two main characters, but at first seems simply to inhabit that time, place, and set of conditions.

When the characters become two grownup women, vacationing after the deaths of their mothers within a week of each other, they happen to meet up in the house again, in front of a “medieval-looking illustrated book” which is on display at the house in the room where they had previously eaten as children there, though there is in the present time no record of any of the children having visited.  Other war time events that took place in the great house are extensively commemorated, they find.  Thus, there is a reversal:  in the original encounter, they had no previous warning of “the thing in the forest,” though both of them were on record as being there, since they were later returned to their mothers, who unlike their fathers survived the war; now, there is no indication that the two main characters were there, whereas there is the illustrated book about family legends regarding the “thing.”  The “thing” can clearly take over places and people in at least this sense of memory.

In the book, the “thing” is spoken of as the “Loathly Worm,” not a dragon with wings but an “English worm,” and is described as having been killed several times by the “scions” of the house (it needs periodically to be “re-killed” because like the earthworm it is compared to, it can grow new heads).

One important feature of the story is that though Penny, the tall thin little girl, now a trained child psychologist, and Primrose, the short plump blonde child, a babysitting storyteller for children, are so different in other respects, the episode has clearly been a major force in both their lives in different ways, as their “vocations” attest, since both have wound up caring for children.

As the two women converse over tea, they finally agree that they both “saw” the Loathly Worm and that it has continued to affect them.  As Penny says, “….I think that there are things that are real–more real than we are–but mostly we don’t cross their paths or they don’t cross ours.  Maybe at very bad times we get into their world, or notice what they are doing in ours.”  For the first time, they admit that maybe the monster disposed of a little girl named Alys whom they had refused to let play with them:  “There had been a mess, a disgusting mess, they remembered, but no particular sign of anything that might have been, or been part of, or belonged to, a persistent little girl called Alys.”  The two women agree to meet up again, but when the time comes, both of them sit alone in separate B & Bs, as if paralyzed by the fear they once felt.  Something peculiar affects them and keeps them apart.

Primrose decides the next day to go back to the forest, while Penny walks off in the opposite direction.  This is characteristic of their personalities as adults:  while Primrose the fairy tale teller is practical and down-to-earth, Penny, the “rationcinative” is impractical and given to avoidance.  Primrose takes a different path into the wood than they had taken the first time.  She enjoys the flowers at first, and the birds and small animals.  We see her as a child in retrospect, loved and protected by a mother who creatively made her some toy stuffed animals each Christmas.  Her view as a developing child is a touching one.  “She told herself stories at night about a girl-woman, an enchantress in a fairy wood, loved and protected by an army of wise and gentle creatures.  She slept banked in by stuffed creatures, as the house in the blitz was banked in by inadequate sandbags.”  She reasons to herself in the present that she should get to the center of the “forest” and Byatt uses a sentence in quotation marks to show that Primrose is the heroine of her own story, thinking of it as a different story she might tell to the children she tends:  “‘She came to the centre and sat on the mossy chair.'”  We are told that normally she does not frighten the children with this particular story of the Loathly Worm from her past.  “She frightened them with slimy things that came up the plughole, or swarmed out of the U-bend in the lavatory, or tapped on windows at night, and were despatched by bravery and magic.  There were waiting goblins in urban dumps beyond the streetlights.  But the woods in her tales were sources of glamour, of rich colours and unseen hidden life, flower fairies and more magical beings.  They were places where you used words like spangles and sequins for real dewdrops on real dock leaves.”  When Primrose has sat a while, she becomes prey to warring desires, the one to go home and the other to stay exactly where she is, questioning if she ever had a home.

Though Penny has taken an apparently opposite route, she too winds up on one side of the wood, so that (as in many a fairy tale) the wood becomes that magical place that all of the champions against it must face.  “She had wagered on freedom and walked away, and walking away had brought her here, as she had known it would.”  She begins to move “as if she were hunted or hunting.”  Since she is apparently looking for the monster, she quite logically begins to trail its scat:  “She found things she remembered, threadworms of knitting wool, unravelled dishcloth cotton, clinging newsprint.  She found odd sausage-shaped tubed of membrane, containing fragments of hair and bone and other inanimate stuffs.  They were like monstrous owl-pellets, or the gut-shaped hair-balls vomited by cats….It had been here, but how long ago?”  She comes out at a place she suddenly recognizes, and finds some “small bones” and a tortoiseshell hairslide, and suddenly the reader begins to speculate again about the child Alys.  Is this a fantasy tale, or a tale about a reality too horrible to relate?  Did the two girls perhaps do something to Alys to make her stop following them through the wood?  Is there a real monster?  In the past, are they seeing a bomb fall, or perhaps seeing the results on the ground of a bomb that has already fallen?   At this point present and past become one for a moment, because the traces of human death are still there.  Penny thinks for a moment of bringing the bones together and burying them, but does not do so.

Primrose enters the forest in the morning of this day in the present of the story; by the time Penny sees “the full moon” and is “released” by the forest, night has clearly come.  Now what do our two main characters do?  Whereas Primrose had previously made up a better type of forest to tell children about, and as Penny had specialized in dreams as a child psychologist, so they both take their own way out again.  They end up going back to town in the same train, but both remembering the expression of misery on the face of the monster, they avoid each other on the platform.  “They saw each other through that black imagined veil which grief, or pain, or despair hangs over the visible world.  They saw each other’s face and thought of the unforgettable misery of the face they had seen in the forest.  Each thought that the other was the witness, who made the thing certainly real, who prevented her from slipping into the comfort of believing she had imagined it or made it up.”

Penny is haunted, and after returning to town, goes back later to the original entrance they’d come in by, wanting to see the monster face to face.  Her story ends with her hearing and smelling its approach.  Primrose overcomes it by telling her children’s group at a mall about it in fairy tale form.  These are two characteristic choices again, but now it is Penny who is facing what she previously avoided and Primrose avoiding ever so delicately what she previously faced, trying to envelope the “Loathly Worm” in a net of fiction.  Byatt’s choice of her subject, however, is characteristic of both, for as readers we are encouraged not only to believe in the monster on a fantastic level, but also to look beyond it, to a harsh reality, the facts of war, death, decay.  And we see, as I believe Byatt wants us to see, that in our century, war is not about a man’s heroic contest with a Loathly Worm, nor perhaps was it ever so simple a thing, even symbolically.  It’s about the quotidian level of destruction which goes on daily through the deliquescence of all uncomplicated daily things which are eliminated in their simple nature during wars and which become so much detritus, trailing mournfully and sluggishly and stinking thorough a “forest,” which bears a mute resemblance to Dante’s “dark forest” also.  Unless we see the conglomeration of all the tiny emblems of our lives which war engulfs, we are unable to track it down; it is we ourselves who are gone and forgotten and left in pieces.

Yet, when this ghastly tale is done, the tale is not after all the worst there is:  for, forgetting would be the worst, and we remember in tales like this one, too.  Whether writing in deadly earnest factual prose or writing a supple and light prose of great poetic and fairy tale beauty, writers like A. S. Byatt don’t forget, nor do they allow us to do so.

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October 8, 2012 · 12:22 am

“You are no bigger than the things that annoy you”–Jerry Bundsen, and why I am a very small person

Today, I had planned to get up, have morning coffee, and write a sterling post on a fascinating topic (or at least on a topic which intrigued me long enough to enable me to invest my attention in it wholly for the time it usually takes me to write a post.  Whether my readers find these topics equally fascinating is a matter for them to tell me, I hope in the “comments” sections).  Then, I’d thought, I’d have a leisurely breakfast.  Next would come a trip to my building’s gym and twenty to thirty minutes of exercise and weight-lifting (I know, I know, I’m a weakling, but supposedly the way to build up graceful muscles rather than bulk is to do it gradually, every day, with some exercises in particular no more than every other day).  After this, aglow with energy and good health,  I was to come back up and read my primary e-mail, which I nearly always enjoy doing on a Sunday because so many of the websites I’m following are active with others’ comments on that day; also, I get a certain increase in comments on my own on some of the weekends.  Next, I was going to read, read, read from some books I have out of the library to try to get them done before I have to return them, no more renewals allowed.  Then lunch, then writing on my fifth novel, which is underway  but stalled right now.  Finally three o’clock coffee and a final burst of exercise for the day in the form of a forty-minute walk and some sit-ups.  After that, I only had to work in dinner, and then I would be able to relax and watch a Poirot mystery on PBS after “The Simpsons,” and then bedtime and more reading.  Ideally, I also had to work in time to wash my hair, listen to some music while I did laundry, and a few other odds and ends, but these things were not essential to a good Sunday, so I knew I could let them slide if I had to.

Does anything strike you as odd about this list?  Such as, perhaps, that I had planned way too much for one day, and was doomed to disappointment?  Yes, maybe, but what strikes me about it even more is that I neglected to take account of the fact that it’s very hard, almost impossible, to get on a computer for other chores and not read your e-mail.  It’s just human nature, I think, on a hazy, warmish Sunday morning when the sun is out just a bit to want to interact with other humans in some way or other, even if only through e-mail and comments and website postings, three things I really enjoy inordinately.  And there’s where the devil entered, because I have two different e-mail programs (this may be normal for you, but I got along for almost ten years with only one), my primary one which is connected to this website and a secondary one which only posts me new info about twice a month, and which I have never learned to work quite properly.  The upshot of this is that I have become negligent (oh, why? oh, why?), and read it only about once or twice a month.

What took my time from about 8:00 this morning until about 3:00 this afternoon?  Trying to get this e-mail program to do things anything like the way my other program does (which is easy and self-evident in the way it operates), in order to read roughly 98 e-mails that had suddenly come through.  And none of these messages were spam or junk or anything like that, but verifiable messages from reputable senders which had to be at least glanced at before I could go on to the next message.  I worked diligently, but I simply could not master all of the options and operations on the secondary e-mail.  Periodically, I took a break:  I got sick to my stomach once with anxiety, which occasionally happens when I have too many things to attend to;  I made sure I had my daily coffees (which on second thought probably wasn’t great for the stomach issue); I ate lunch at about 3:00.  The rest of the time I and a willing and intelligent helper with more computer experience than I do tried and tried to get the e-mail program to work.  Finally, the best we could do was to read all the e-mail and put the things it turned out I didn’t need into the delete file, and respond to a few things.  Whew!  What an ordeal!

None of the other chores got done except for the 40 minute walk and sit-ups and dinner of a sort, the exercise being good for getting rid of some tension and dinner good for a little further relaxation, once it was done.

Do you see now why–considering the size of the things that annoy me, vis-à-vis the title of this post–that I consider myself a “small” person (in literal terms, I’m a stocky 5’9″)?  It’s because the very things which compose some people’s daily routine defied me (a series of computer glitches and problems which originate in conundrums much more serious than a simple lack of knowledge about which thing to click on, a full schedule which doesn’t allow for any wiggle room in order to get lots of things done correctly).  In fact, it wasn’t so much that I was defied by computer problems as that I allowed myself to be upset (I didn’t mention I was upset?  I raised my voice in talking to the computer, in talking to my kind helper, I swore like the proverbial sailor, I banged my hands on the table, I held my head in my hands, and other such signs of sturm und drang).

So, what is the answer to being a “larger” person?  I did thank my helper after we were done; I tried to show some humor about my previous upset.  I ate a light dinner, so that I could get a good night’s sleep, ready to start again tomorrow.  I’m very low energy right now (this is a real-time post!), so if my post seems silly to you or bitchy, that may be why.  In truth, in the same way people tell us that we never really make up lost sleep, so also maybe we never really make up for badly invested energy.  At least, however, I can feel that the energy I’ve spent in writing this post has been well-invested, if only in the sense that it may operate as a cautionary tale:  don’t be as “small” and petty as to allow yourself so much self-indulgent emotion.  It’s that complicated, and that simple.  Though I was myself only good at meditation and yoga for a brief time of my life (when life was simpler anyway!), find some way to take yourself out of what is bugging you, or at least some way of recovering your equilibrium periodically while you are trying to address your difficulties.  Otherwise, you will need to acknowledge to some other people who may be expecting to see you or hear from you or read you (as I owed you, my readers, a post earlier today) that you are, at least upon occasion, a “small” person.  Here’s hoping you don’t mind hearing from me anyway!

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October 5, 2012 · 4:24 pm

“Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale”–Wolfgang Hildesheimer and choice of form

At first reading, “Why I Transformed Myself Into a Nightingale” is a light, frivolous, playful short story featuring a fantastic tale of episodes in the life of a magician.  The first paragraph which begins the story is even fantastic while it sounds rather dry and factual in form, because the “magician” is telling the story after the transformation has taken place, when (presumably) all he can do is sing.  We therefore are entering his fantastic world from the first moment, because it would seem (from his bothering to explain to us his choice) that we can understand the nightingale’s “words” in his song:  “Acting on the strength of my convictions, I transformed myself into a nightingale.  Since neither the reason nor the resolve necessary for this sort of action lies within the realm of the ordinary, I think the story of this metamorphosis is worth telling.”  Yet, as will emerge, both the “reason” and the “resolve” are a great deal more easily understandable for readers than what the narrative voice asks us to believe, which is that he mastered the art of turning people into animals.  We are asked to accept the totally fantastic in addition to a tale of a man being in a rather ordinary though selfish frame of mind, or at least one which is ordinary by comparison.

The speaker begins by telling us about his parents, his father being a zoologist, his mother an actress.  It is almost as if the practical and the (aesthetically) magical meet in his family history and descent thus.  He describes the magic kit they give him to amuse himself with, which he soon masters and discards when he reads the condescending legend on it, “The Little Magician.”  Later, he asks for regular magic lessons and is caught up in giving performances for those who know him well.  A noticeable change comes about in the magician’s attitude toward what he does, however, as he grows up:  “I outgrew my teacher and began experimenting on my own.  I didn’t neglect my academic education, though.  I read a lot and went around with school friends whose patterns of development I observed.  One friend who had been given an electric train in his childhood was preparing for a career with the railroad; another who had played with tin soldiers decided on a career as a military officer.  In this way, the work force was regulated by early influences.”  Nevertheless, the magician is at least convinced that he himself is not influenced by early training, though it becomes obvious through his later “choice of form” that he is deceiving himself.

As he tries to select a career, a very telling notion occurs to him, which shows that as a person he is on the surface more concerned with ethics than others of his age.  Yet, he too ends up making “ethical” choices which clearly show in a fantastic way that he has not entirely escaped “interference” in the lives of others, which he says he is trying to avoid:  “[I had a] growing awareness that I couldn’t select a conventional, bourgeois profession without in some way interfering with other people’s lives….When I came to this realization, I came to yet another, namely that only the momentary state of things can be perceived, that it is merely idle speculation to try to draw conclusions or gather knowledge from experience.  I decided to spend my life in leisure and contemplate nothing.  I got two turtles, sat down on a lounge chair, and watched the birds above me and the turtles beneath me.  I had given up magic because my art had reached a state of perfection.  I felt that I was able to change people into animals [emphasis mine].  I didn’t make use of this ability, though, because I believed that this sort of interference into another person’s life was completely unjustifiable.”  Yet at the same time, the narrator reports that he himself has a strong desire to become a bird, because it leads what he calls a “pure existence.”  He is thinking on one level that he cannot interfere with anyone else, yet he is thinking on another that “I need[] only a test of my art” to know for sure if he can change people into animals!

As with every story of temptation, once he imagines the possibility, an “opportunity” comes along to test his powers.  A friend, Mr. Werhahn, comes to visit, and is full of complaints about the journalists whom he manages as an editor.  He happens in the midst of his complaints to catch sight of the speaker’s turtles and desolately remarks that he would like to be a turtle.  And, it’s no sooner said than done, though if our speaker had really meant what he says about non-interference, of course, he wouldn’t so readily have interpreted the remark as a factual, genuine expression of desire to be transformed.  Upon the instant, he has three turtles, though offering the reader a sop, he says, “(Just for the record, I’d like to assure you that I purchased the other two animals as such.)”  This is a very comical version of the sort of thing people say when they are making excuses for other excesses.

Next, “I used my art one other time before my own metamorphosis.”  In this case, however, the magician feels some degree of compunction, symbolically because it has to do with music, an art form in which one, while singing lyrics, may express many emotions which are contrary-to-fact.  This second case also has to do with birds, living as which may not appeal to others as it does to the speaker (to enter for a moment into his odd world).  He is sitting at an inn under a tree drinking apple cider, when five young girls come along and start singing a song, in which a speaker expresses a desire to be a sparrow.  The narrator is annoyed by their sounds, and so takes their words as factual:  he changes them into sparrows.  Though the reader may see no real difference in the two cases of transformation so far described, the narrator says that his worry is because “I had the feeling that I had acted emotionally, under the influence of my (certainly justified) irritation.  I thought that this wasn’t worthy of me, so I decided not to delay my own metamorphosis any longer.”  He assures us that he is not afraid of prosecution, because of course he could change his pursuers into “toy fox terriers!  It was more the certainty that, for technical reasons, I would never find the unspoiled peace I needed for the pure enjoyment of things, undisturbed by the will.  Somewhere a dog would always bark, a child scream, or a young girl sing.”

He decides to change himself into a nightingale because he likes the idea of flight from place to place and ironically enough “I wanted to sing because I love music.  The thought that I would interfere in the life of someone else whose sleep I might disturb did occur to me.  But now that I am no longer human, I have put away my human thoughts and interests.  My ethic is now the ethic of a nightingale.”  The real question here is whether he ever really had a human ethic, a human relationship to others, which would enable him to see their point of view.

Thus, this story about a choice of form is a meditation upon what it is really to enter into the pains and sufferings and also the joys of other human beings without wanting to change them.  Many serious ethical world texts express the idea that we cannot change the world, only ourselves.  But the ultimately selfish, egotistical/egoistical narrator comes to this belief only from a limited point of view, not because he wants to master and control his own worst impulses, but with regret because he cannot have total control over what is going on around him.  Yet, Hildesheimer is always light of touch, and we can see that this story is not only about a choice the narrator has made, to be a beautifully trilling bird perched on a branch in the dark night singing, but a choice the author has made likewise, to be a storyteller who gets across singingly in few words some of the same points that a long, anguished, and argumentative treatise on ethics might do.  We may of course remember that magic is also known as “legerdemain,” or lightness of hand.  The story is written almost as a parody of the sort of speech, partly cautionary and partly leadership-oriented, that an important public figure might be expected to give to students who are trying to choose a career, and this is where the author’s appeal is especially notable.  Is it a case of “don’t do what I did,” or is it a case of “this is what makes me particularly suited to stand before you today”?  The story almost seems to suggest that all along the character is deficient of human moral considerations, and thus is better off as a nightingale, with “the ethics of a nightingale,” those which he seemed to start out with.  Yet, the whole piece is one which a reader may be enchanted by, and may read through with whimsy, almost without noticing the seriousness of it.  As the narrator says finally, “Now it is May.  It is dusk, and soon it will be dark.  Then I begin to sing, or, as humans say, strike up my song.”

I have given some long quotes from this story, and more or less summed up the action, yet there is still a great deal to be gotten from it, and those interested in what I’ve written should certainly read it for themselves.  For one thing, there’s the moral/magical question of why, when most magic tricks involve the restoration of order once the “trick” is done (the egg is put back together somehow, the assistant is shown to be still in one piece), the narrator cannot change his friend back from a turtle to a human, or why the girls cannot be changed back from sparrows?  And who exactly is the public speaker/nightingale voice narrating?  What do you think?  A truely magical story, wouldn’t you say?

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October 3, 2012 · 5:21 pm

On the subject of growing old–Oscar Wilde and Andrew Marvell

As we know from two very different perspectives, there is always a penalty to be paid when one ages:  either one becomes older and wickeder and uglier, or one (in sadness) acquires the ability to be more mature and more knowledgeable and more composed about one’s appearance (a moralist’s view of older and wickeder and uglier.  As a non-professional moralist and a person of 55, sometimes I feel I belong to one camp, sometimes to the other).  Both Oscar Wilde and Andrew Marvell have written on the topic of youth and age in well-known works, Wilde in his novella “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Marvell in his poem “To His Coy Mistress.”  As well, the two authors are interested in what can constitute the golden mean of outwitting a loathesome age or the just punishment for evading the maturity that should come naturally to a naturally composed person.

In “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Dorian is at first merely a somewhat flighty, attractive, shallow young man who is beloved by the painter Basil Hayward, a man painting his portrait.  But along comes Sir Henry Wotton (Harry to his intimates) who derives a certain amusement from dragging Dorian into haunts of bad repute and amongst evil characters.  Dorian makes a wish that his portrait, a triumph of the painterly art when Hayward finishes it, might take on the characteristics of his appearance as he ages, and leave him free to appear always young and handsome (and as the Arabic saying goes “Be careful what you wish for, because you will surely receive it”).  This is in fact what happens.  By the end of the novel, Dorian has murdered the author of his artistic being, Hayward, and outdone Wotton in the degree of his depravity.  When he tries to destroy the by-now-unsightly picture, however, catastrophe strikes, reminding us that “The truth will out” or “What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh,” or a hundred other aphorisms.  I say aphorisms are in a sense the point here, because Wilde was in some works especially a moralist, and the notions of morality were never far from even his lightest touch with the pen.

With Marvell’s poem, the point is a little otherwise, and it’s really a triumph to both authors that this should be so.  What I mean by this is that Wilde wrote his story and ended it as he did and published it when he was only thirty-five; his story is about how much more graceful and mature and moral it is to accept age as it comes.  By contrast, Marvell wrote his frolicky poem “To His Coy Mistress” by the time he was about 60, a poem in which apparently the lady being addressed is a young virgin and the male voice speaking has much of the urgency of an equally young swain courting her.  But then, who better to be an expert on the carpe diem theme, perhaps, than a man a great deal older than a woman he is courting, so that possibly my point is not well-made?  At any rate, his reminder that “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace” is definitely a pointed reminder to the lady.  As he also informs her, it may be that “worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,/And your quaint honor turn to dust,/And into ashes all my lust.”  (Note for my readers:  at the time Marvell was writing, “mistress” may or may not have meant “mistress” as we use it today.  It also meant “girlfriend,” “lady of the house,” “one whom I admire,” and sometimes simply “Mrs.”  As well, in a context like this, the word “quaint” was a pun on the “c” word, which is used rudely these days as a word for a woman one disrespects.  The disrespect was not current in Marvell’s poem.)

The end of the poem, however, is where Marvell’s “fable” diverges from Wilde’s.  Wilde’s fable has a serious and a tragic ending; Marvell’s fabulous poem surpasses the flourish of imagery at its beginning with a truly cosmic witty imagination at its end:  “Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life:/Thus, though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”  Or, do the two fables (and I am using the word “fable” imprecisely in this paragraph) really diverge?  Wilde’s novella shows one failure to stay young at heart and hope at least, a failure which is particularly desperate.  Whatever age Marvell’s speaker and his mistress may be imagined to have, they have come up with yet another solution:  to “seize the day” and make the most of the time they have together.  Yet to some readers, this solution seems a little hasty, as does Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” on a similar theme, beginning “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”  In all cases, the devastating abilities of time and old age are acknowledged; the main divergence of the fables is in which choice they choose to portray.  Wilde’s tale is cautionary though witty, Marvell’s is witty, though with an underlying morality of seriousness.  Both authors are indicating the need for a golden mean, though one shows a character notably failing of it and another is trying to persuade a woman to disregard her doubts, her doubts holding her back because of a kind of “coyness”; there is, after all, no indication in the poem that she is unwilling to listen.

And so, readers, just as an afterthought, what were you planning to get around to soon?  What had you determined to carpe diem, or “seize the day” about?  Perhaps you were planning to wash the car, or read a particular book, or pay a peculiar relative a visit, or write a post:  as Wilde would have it, do so with loving-kindness and an awareness of your privilege of being still among the living, and as Marvell would have it, don’t forget why you’re doing it today (because you’re still vital enough).

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October 1, 2012 · 3:18 pm

“A few suggestions which may make continuing a halted or bogged-down manuscript a little easier….”

Hello out there, writing chums!  C’mon now, no need to be modest, we all write something, even if it’s only a letter or e-mail to an old friend, or the weekly grocery or chore list.  And I believe I’ve hit upon a list of suggestions which may help you continue a halted piece of writing as they have me (I shy away from the word “rules,” as it makes me halt and become bogged-down in turn, and unable to compose sentences).  What I’m saying (to borrow two terms from grammar) is that these suggestions are not prescriptive like rules (that is, they don’t dictate to you what you should do); rather they are descriptive (they are about what someone before you actually has done, namely I, to stir up my writing abilities).  By altering them only slightly to suit yourself, you may be able to use them for a critical or scholarly paper, a list of chores (we all tend to be able to remember 9-10 things in a row, but you may have to prod your memory for the other ones), a short story, novel, or even perhaps a poem.

Here goes:

Assuming that you have at least a snippet of your text already in mind, one of the things most writers of note will mention to you is to “outline” your ideas so that you can continue with the rest of your plan.  Obviously, you can do this, but for some of us the building of an outline deadens the process of dreaming up new ideas quickly and jotting them down before they vanish; I number myself among these people.  The outline-devotees at this point will go on from jotting down things to prioritizing them with A.B.C. and 1.2.3. and I am not at all suggesting that this is a bad method; I am simply saying it stifles my own creative abilities.  It is still related to what I do with my own method, which is to jot down item after item after item all over the top, bottom, sides, and in the margins of a piece of paper, and then mark them out one by one as I write them into my manuscript.  I do sometimes combine them slightly with the outline form by looking over them and prioritizing them with 1.2.3. or underlining the key sections.  The main advantage of this method (it’s perhaps too chaotic to call a “system”) is that if I am working with ideas which appear in a heavy cloud, again it allows me to get it all down before it vanishes.  Then I just abstract ideas, or images, or lines of dialogue from the cloud and use them in the work.

Another method of coping with a piece which won’t “move forward” is to re-read it, either the entire piece, whether long or short, just to see what you haven’t yet covered, or perhaps the last 10-20 pages before it breaks off, to get an idea of where you want to go next with the characterizations, or if it’s a grocery list to see what spices (for example) you’re out of that’re needed with the other items you’ve written down, or if the work is a letter to remember what scandals you haven’t yet told your absent friend about.  Here’s a place where the method doesn’t work as well as the outline method for those writing papers, because of course they already have a set course to cover, and will only be surprised if something else comes up while they are writing, as of course it may do (a new bit of research may turn up while they are composing on the basis of older research, etc.).  In that case, even the outliners may need to rewrite a section before final revision time (and most kinds of writing occasionally or often require final revisions, depending on what they are and how lengthy).

A third method, one not unrelated to the second, except for the fact that it allows you to sort of “sneak up” on the piece of work you’re doing, as if it were a shy bird or butterfly you were attempting to photograph and might scare away, is to go back to the beginning for proofreading.  This is different from method 2 because the original intent and focus of the exercise is on the writing as writing and not on “plot” or “content.”  In the letter or e-mail, you may have chosen to compose a previous part with a flourish of writerly skills which drove a related idea you meant to express straight out of your head, and so quizzical are the potentates of memory that rereading your original flippancy or splash of egocentricity may call the hidden rulers of memory forth again to articulate the lost idea.  In the list, you may have chosen a luxury item instead of something you need more, and re-reading the luxury item on your list may perhaps cause you to be forced to decide between the two or possibly to write them both down as things which for some reason you feel you need.  This method may work for the scholarly writing exercise too, because we all love to show off our writing skills a little (just note some of my odd and peculiar metaphors above, which you may feel are nothing to show off about!), and we may have forgotten or overlooked a toad lurking beneath the blossom, as it were.  But if you’re lucky, sometimes a short snippet of a continuation may occur almost magically in your mind from rereading the previous phrasing and because you have edited the previous portions up to the break.

If none of this works, leave the piece to mature a little further before tinkering with it again.  It may simply need time to become a sort of magnet for other ideas, images and plot lines (and here I’m mixing metaphors, as “magnets” are not usually “tinkered” with, nor do they conventionally “mature”).  With the list, if that is what you are composing, you can always leave it on the counter for others to add their suggestions and comments, knowing full well that at the end of the day (at least with this one sort of writing) if your six year old writes “more candy” on the list, or if your roommate writes “your obsessive-compulsive lists make me barf,” you can ignore, delete, or rewrite the list to suit yourself.  Now if only it were that easy for scholars, novelists, and poets!

What are your tricks and traps for catching and holding fleeting inspiration and getting it to work for you?  Why not share with other writers here just what helps you get writing when your manuscript refuses to go forward?

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