My Grand Experiment?

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my cubicle

My little writing space

In a prior post, I noted that silence makes me restless; that I need a bit of noise, the strange–or at least the different–to stimulate my imagination when I write.  Lately, though, I’ve just been restless, plain and simple.  So I’ve decided, for at least the first three months of 2013, to embark on an “environmental” experiment.  I’ve started writing at The Writers Room D.C.

Created in the fall of 2012, and apparently modeled on the writers’ rooms they have in New York (quite a few in Brooklyn, I must say!),  the Writers Room D.C. is one large room, a wall of windows on one side, with 18 two-sided cubicles containing desks and lamps, in which serious writers (published or emerging) can have their own little writer’s space away from home and home’s distractions.  There’s a small open space where one can take a break to relax and read, and an anteroom with a little kitchenette (with a supply of coffee, tea, a small refrigerator, and a sink–restrooms are down the hall); lockers (where you can store your computer and/or work rather than carry them back and forth each day); a printer (for small jobs); and a small side room in which to make phone calls.  Oh–and you can bring coffee or tea into your writing space, but food must be consumed in the kitchenette.

For me, who usually needs the sense of freedom that wandering gives and the ambient noise of coffee shops–not to mention nibbling as I write–this is a new way of working.  The    immediate difficulty for me so far, of course, is the utter quiet in the work-area.  Though it may be a self-imposed reaction on my part, it feels like an enforced silence–like if I laugh at something I’m reading, I have violated it.  And sometimes, going feels like obligation, like I’d rather be out having an adventure.  But then again, who’s making me go? –Me.

On the plus side, going there does seem to be getting me to follow more of a regular work-schedule, and working side by side with others doing the same does alleviate that sense of isolation I feel when trying to work at home.  In addition, people will chat for a bit when they break to get coffee, and the founders are creating some small social events to help us to get to know each other.  Also, I don’t have to pack up my computer every time I need to go to the ladies room–a more important plus than one might think.

So how is the experiment working out for me?  It’s early days yet.  I’ve only been at it for about three weeks.  The proof will be in the pudding, as they used to say.  We’ll see how much I get written (of quality) in these three months.  So far, I have found that, although the silence is generally disturbing when I come in, once I get into the work, I can, to a degree, get engrossed in what I’m writing and forget that it is so quiet.  I do think that, for me, a writers’ room’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. That is, working side by side with other writers removes that sense of isolation, but when one is surrounded by other like-minded people, one is deprived of access to the unexpected encounter that provides new ideas.  Eventually, I will have to find some way to balance my time there with my need for the creative stimulation wandering gives.  I’m not used to bifurcating my time in that way.  But that doesn’t mean that I can’t learn to.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

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Okay.  So I am late with my first-Tuesday-of-the-month post.  I could plead that I whooped it up on New Year’s Eve and it took all of New Years Day (the first Tuesday of January) plus a few days more to recover, but the truth is that I spent New Year’s Eve (and the few days before it) clearing the decks for action in 2013–weeding out old papers and notes, and organizing my workroom to better support my writing while the Twilight Zone Marathon played on the t.v. in background.

In addition, I finally reread at one go (well, over the course of three days) a lifetime of family letters, a visit to the past that somehow seemed appropriate at the end of one year and beginning of another.   Even more so, now that I think of it, since 2012 would have been my mother’s hundredth year.   An anniversary of sorts.  How strange.

My parents were always so modern and progressive in their thinking that it is sometimes hard for my mind to encompass the fact that their lives traversed such a long-gone period.  (In 1912, there was no radio, no t.v., no airplanes, certainly no internet and no cell phones.)  At the same time, being raised by them (I was a late child) gave me a strong affinity to the struggles of the progressives in the early 1900s as well as a New Deal perspective on the world that has been my anchor and, over the years, often made my approach and thinking about that world quite different from, though ostensibly parallel to, that of my peers.

And as we leave 2012 (the hundredth anniversary of my mother’s birth) and enter 2013 (come September, the hundredth anniversary of my father’s birth), I am struck by two trite truisms:  “what goes around comes around;” and “the  more things change, the more they stay the same.”  There have been remarkable, wonderful changes in the world, of course–a black person becoming president speaks to that.  (Although, when we have reached a point that we only need note that he is a brilliant man, then we can say there has been a real change in the world and in humanity.)  At the same time, we are fighting (or shall I say, re-fighting) the exact same battles as were fought by progressives in the early part of the 1900s.  The issues of corporate greed and war profiteering that Dos Passos addressed in USA (completed in 1936), the hypocrisy of religion-as-business that Sinclair Lewis addressed in Elmer Gantry (published in 1927), and the picture of middle Americans who both buy the capitalist corporatism fed to them as an ideal, and are trapped by it, that Lewis portrays in Babbitt (published in 1922) are engulfing us again today.  As an example, one short paragraph from Babbitt, from a chapter describing what different citizens of Zenith are doing after Babbitt goes to sleep:

At that moment a G.A.R. veteran was dying.  He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods.  He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the bible, McGuffey’s readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, and that the United States is a democracy.

Who can read this, published in 1922, and not think of the world the “Tea Party” and right- wing Christians want to take us to, a mere ninety years later?  Or, in reading that so lightly tossed forth but potent phrase in the last line (pairing U.S. democracy with a belief that the earth is flat), of the Citizen’s United case and its effect on democracy, or of the efforts to suppress people’s ability to vote?  And of those people today who are the victims of this but don’t see it?  (I highly recommend Babbitt, which I am in the midst of reading now.)

But, enough of this bout of nostalgia, borrowed or otherwise.  The world changes, but our human battles stay the same, albeit with slight variations.  I wish a belated happy new year to one and all, and to my writer friends–as a friend once said to me:  “all power to your writing elbow!”

 

 

 

WHAT I’M READING NOW: MUSING AND MEANDERING AS ONE BOOK LEADS TO ANOTHER

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I was watching the original film version of The Wolf Man and got the notion to try writing a story that reverses The Wolf Man‘s premise.  In the original, the man is transformed into a wolf, and the animal is shown as an unthinking monster.  Thus, the most immediate technical problem presented to me was how to portray the wolf before he transforms into a man.  I did not particularly want to anthropomorphize the wolf–have him think in words–but if not, how was I to get across what happens in the wolf’s mind?  I decided to review the works of others to see how they handled it.

I skimmed the start of The Call of the Wild and a bit of White Fang, and put them aside, realizing that Jack London gives us the dogs’ thoughts as if they were human.

Then I picked up Kipling’s The Jungle Book.  Kipling begins by stating that wolves don’t communicate in words like men do, but he expresses what occurs between them in words, as if he is translating.  Though I quickly realized Kipling’s treatment also would not serve my purpose, I was entranced by his writing, couldn’t put the thing down, and read to the end.  When I first encountered the book (I believe my brother read it to me when I was young), I loved the adventure of it.  But this time around, I found a depth in it that I had not expected:  Mowgli is a person caught between two cultures, or as some sociologists might put it, “lost between two worlds,” and ultimately not able to live comfortably in either of them.  This led me to think of the duality inherent in both Mowgli and the Wolf Man and that, in turn, led me to read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Although I have read many other works by Robert Louis Stevenson, I had never read Jekyll and Hyde, but had only seen it on film.  In reading it, I was astonished to find that it is not presented as science fiction or as horror, but as a mystery.  Throughout most of the chapters, one is led to believe, along with the narrator, that Mr. Hyde is a separate person who is blackmailing Dr. Jekyll.  It is only near the end that we discover they are one man split into two, and only in the last chapter that we get Jekyll’s recitation of events, which becomes the basis for the film versions.

Jekyll writes very specifically of man’s dual nature–indeed, he postulates that man may have many sides (a precursor of the theory of multiple personalities?)–and that he had felt that “if each…[of the two natures] could be housed in separate identities…the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”

This explanation of the duality of man’s nature in the Jekyll and Hyde novella, published in 1886, led me to wonder when Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, also about the dual nature of man, was published (it first appeared in 1890), and what there was in their common era that led writers particularly to explore this theme.  So off I went to reread The Picture of Dorian Gray.

To me, the most puzzling aspect of this novel is Oscar Wilde’s own comments on his characters.  Wilde wrote that Basil Hallward (the honorable artist who begins by worshipping Dorian and ends horribly murdered by Dorian when he takes him to task for his infamies) “is what I think I am;” that Lord Henry (who espouses an amoral aesthetic and ostensibly leads Dorian astray) is “what the world thinks me;” and that “Dorian [is] what I would like to be–in other ages, perhaps.”  I can easily believe Wilde’s statements about Basil and Lord Henry and, given the double life Wilde, as a homosexual, was forced to live, I can understand an affinity for a character living a double life.  But, given the novel’s presentation of Dorian as a shallow, rationalizing, and ultimately cowardly, self-deceiving hypocrite, what does Wilde mean when he says Dorian is what he would like to be?

In addition, when I originally read Wilde’s works, I felt them quite clever, but also shallow, and at the same time, in some instances, moralistic to the point of melodrama.  Now though, rereading The Picture of Dorian Gray, I wonder how much of the cleverness may have been a pose he hid behind in order to prevent being hurt, and how he might have written if he had lived in our time which, though not where it should be in the treatment of gay people, is, I expect, somewhat less punishing than the time in which Wilde lived.

These questions have taken me to what I am reading now:  Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann, and Wilde’s long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis.  

 

“Lirty Dies” –“Spoonerisms” of The Capitol Steps

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I went, not long ago, to see a performance of the Capitol Steps.  They’re very talented and very funny, of course.  But what struck me most was one particular routine, a solo speech entitled:  Lirty Dies: The Load to the Erection 2012–What a Lunch of Boozers, in which the performer swapped the letters in certain words to humorously irreverent effect.  In the title, for example, the first letter of the first two words are switched so that “dirty lies” becomes “lirty dies,” and the first letter of road is switched with the second letter of election  to become Load to the Erection, etc.

I found this speech fascinating on two accounts:  first, the way in which the switches created clever and pointed satire (the Capitol Steps’ stock and trade, but still…); and second, the fact that the entire audience, me included, could comprehend the new meaning and the original meaning simultaneously.  (Indeed, the humor–the laugh–came in part from the juxtaposition of the two meanings.)  It felt like listening to two very different kinds of music at the same time and being able to hear both equally.  I would not have thought it possible and was amazed at my being able to do it.   How did they and we accomplish it?

To figure out how our minds accommodate two meanings at once, let’s look at a couple of examples from the speech.  There’s the reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger:  “He had a waby out of bedlock” in place of “he had a baby out of wedlock.”  Perhaps it is the connection the mind automatically makes between wedlock and bedlock that permits one to grasp both meanings at once?  (I should note that the Capitol Steps play fair; that is, the speech also addresses the foibles of John Edwards and Anthony Weiner.)

Then there’s the reference to Rick Perry, referred to as Pick Rerry:  “The Stapitol Ceps have always said you were stumber than a dump.”  Which is more insulting?  To call someone dumber than a stump?  Or stumber than a dump, with the colloquial associations  “dump” brings to mind?  Either way, the mind registers the insult.

But how does one approach writing this sort of thing?  Do you write a straight speech stating what you want to communicate and then mechanically start inverting letters to see what combinations turn up?  Do you start with sentences like “We got the boring Mormon, Mitt Romney.  And we got our old pal Newt Gingrich,” and just start switching letters around, playing with them to see what comes up until one arrives (as the Capitol Steps do) at:  “We got the moring Borman, Ritt Momney.  And we got our old nal Poot Gingrich”?  Surely the swap resulting in a reference to Borman is not accidental; nor the reference to Poot, which one is bound to associate with poo.  Or does one somehow figure out what swaps will work when composing the underlying speech?

Finally, is this a technique best applied in satire and farce?  Could it also be put to powerful use in a darker form of literature?  Admittedly, I don’t think the technique could be sustained throughout the length of a novel.  But, I do think it would be an interesting exercise to experiment with it, to test the limits of its possible applications.  What’s the worst that could come of it?  Even if playing with the technique did not result in a new, innovative story, it would gain one the pleasure of playing with language and what the mind may do with it.  And that could lead one into  other new and interesting work.

 

Where do YOU write?

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The Chinese Arch through Starbuck’s windows.

3:15p.m. 10-1-2012

As I write this, I am sitting at a long community table in the Chinatown Starbucks on the corner of 7th and H streets, N.W.  Two older gentlemen in sweaters that make them look like academics are sitting to my right, having a lively discussion in Spanish.  A part of me is trying to pull back enough of my high school Spanish to follow it, but all I can pick up  is some sense that they are discussing education of Latinos (their word) in the United States, and perhaps something about Latino-Americans and Christianity.  Across the table to my left, a man with tufts of hair pointing straight up at the top of his head, his lips pursed in concentration, is working at a computer.  At the end of the table, a homeless man is drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper.  Outside the large windows are D.C.’s Chinese Arch and the landscape of the 7th street corridor.  There’s music coming from a speaker, heavy blues.  And I am stoked for action.

Some people need to get away from all distraction to obtain the peace of mind that allows them to create.  Not me.  Silence makes me restless.  It’s while I’m walking through city streets that I work out bits of plot or dialogue, stopping, as they come, to note them down on a yellow pad before I move on.  It’s in restaurants and coffee shops, where I can stop in the middle of a thought to stare at some interesting sight or let my mind temporarily wander over to some interesting conversation, that I develop and write parts of stories I’m working on.  I don’t know a single soul around me; what I write will have nothing to do with them; but sitting in their lively company helps me to concentrate.  So give me the company of strangers.  The stranger, the better.  There’s nothing like it to pull the ink from my pen.

Gotta go now.  Gonna write a story.

p.s.  What works for you?

FIVE Intriguing First Sentences:

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No. 1:  “Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room.”

The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

The second sentence of this novel reads:  “She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath.”  Between the first two sentences, the novel starts us out with some suspense (why is Mira hiding?  From whom is she hiding? And why in the ladies’ room?), a strong dose of character (Mira is not a feminist–or, at minimum, not the kind who would correct the labeling of bathroom doors), and a strong sense of what the novel’s theme may be.  It makes one curious about Mira and wanting to know more about her predicament, whatever it may turn out to be.

No. 2:  “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

That a man facing a firing squad should be thinking about his father taking him to discover ice rather than his imminent death is immediately intriguing.  Farther along in that first paragraph, Marquez writes:  “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”  Marquez is creating a place so isolated that they only learn of the world’s inventions through gypsies that come through once a year.  Farther along in the chapter, he tells one of a villager who, based only on the items he obtains from the gypsies, takes both the scientific steps and missteps that the outside world took centuries to perform.  (Eg. using a telescope to make astronomical discoveries, but also trying to turn lead into gold.)

No. 3:  “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.”
Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis, Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges

The conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia?  The idea that a mirror and an encyclopedia together result in a discovery suggests an unusual juxtaposition of ideas and a narrator (and a writer) with an unusual way of looking at the world.  And Uqbar?  What is Uqbar?  What was discovered?

No. 4:  “I am an invisible man.”
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (prologue)

Ellison’s paragraph goes on to explain the kind of invisible he is:  “…I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids–and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”  Before one knows anything more about the story, the idea of someone being invisible not through accident or by choice or even because people simply overlook him, but because they positively refuse to see him gives the character a sympathy, and the start of this novel an interest and a power.

No. 5:  “Amoebae leave no fossils.  They haven’t any bones.  (No teeth, no belt buckles, no wedding rings.)”
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

Okay.  So I cheated with this one.   Two short sentences and a parenthetical phrase.  But, one has to admit, it is an intriguing, tongue-in-cheek beginning.  Robbins is making a connection by contrast between amoebae and people, and one has to wonder, where is he going with this?  To Wonder sufficiently to be amused and keep reading.

WHAT ALL THESE BEGINNINGS HAVE IN COMMON, perhaps the most important thing they have in common (beyond a quick and sure introduction of compelling characters and/or situations), is an intriguing idea.  Something that suggests this writer’s way of looking at the world is different from what one commonly encounters, and that, if one reads on, that difference is going to make the work intellectually exciting.