The old man and the cat.

And the man turned, looked past the wine bottle at the cat. Furry, fluffy, desolate. And the man knew then he would not pat that cat though he wanted to, just like he had in that house in the snow in Austria where he'd sat with another cat and another bottle of wine, where they'd looked out the window at all the cat tracks in the snow, muddy, blurry, and someone said they weren't cat tracks, no, those aren't cat tracks, but they were cat tracks and they saw those cat tracks all that winter until they died.

(Apologies to Hemingway)

Graham Swift on the Narrative Physics of Novels

I've just read an interesting article from the English writer Graham Swift (Waterland, Last Orders) about the slowness of writing. I've long admired Swift, though it would be over the top to say I've loved all his work. There are great snatches: the final image of the motorbike standing alone by the canal's edge in Waterland, the moment the old geezers have their puffing and heaving fight (they're trying to swagger) on the hillside in Last Orders.

 

Anyone who works on prose fiction likely knows the strange feeling that writing can flow, and you can get a lot done quickly in a scene, but a narrative as a whole is painstaking. I've written most of the passages in my current novel quite quickly, with a sense of being in the real-time 'bubble' of the scene. Hearing the spoken dialogue at the speed those words are spoken, watching characters move across the landscape in the time it would take in the world. And yet it's taken years to get to the point I'm at.

From the article.

I’m not disheartened by the thought that what takes me years to write may occupy a reader for just a few hours. To have made, perhaps, a benign intrusion into someone else’s life for even such a short duration seems to me quite a feat of communication, and if that communication becomes for readers not just a means of passing those hours, but a time-suspending experience that stays with them well after they’ve closed the book and that they might one day wish to return to, then that’s as much as any novelist can hope for.

Most of us are probably not aware of exactly what we're doing when we read, and how we slip in and out of ticking-clock-time. Maybe that's one of the roles of the novel, and of reading itself, to disrupt that regimentation.

The answers to the question that arises out of my opening paragraph are simple ones. Why do novels take so long to write when so many scenes go by in real time?

* drafting and redrafting until it's the best we can do to have the text do the story justice

* writing isn't just the fingers on keyboards phase, it's the reading back, the thinking, the reframing

* the moment so often seen as the 'creative moment' is just a beginning. There's much work to do after that.

To read the full article, click here.

Death of a Salesman's Audience

Interesting article by Lee Siegel in the New York Times detailing how the U.S. economy has become so stagnant for all but the wealthy and theater ticket prices have got so expensive that the (lower ) middle class depicted in Arthur Miller's great play 'Death of a Salesman' can mostly no longer afford to go and see it. A shame for many reasons, not the least of which I'd imagine Phillip Seymour Hoffman would make a great Willy Loman.

From the article:

Certainly few middle-class people, or at least anyone from any “middle class” that Loman would recognize, are among the audiences attending this production. What was once a middle-class entertainment has become a luxury item. Tickets for the original run, in 1949, cost between $1.80 and $4.80; tickets for the 2012 run range from $111 to $840. After adjusting for inflation, that’s a 10-fold increase, well beyond the reach of today’s putative Willy Lomans.

Tickets aren't exactly cheap in New Zealand either, even without the stellar casts. It is rare that I go to the theater, as I usually do the maths in my head about what other books/films I could enjoy for the price of the ticket. Nevertheless, live theater is still a unique environment in which to absorb story.

I'd image in terms of quality of content, Death of a Salesman will be performed forever, but will there be anyone much left who can afford to see it.

Read the full article here.

Synopses.

I've had a couple of discussions recently about writing a synopsis.

Synopses are much more difficult than we imagine, but they need not be a chore. The first things to get sorted are: 

• who is the synopsis for? (A publisher, an agent, to go with a publicity pack)
• what is the next action you want the reader to take after reading the synopsis? (ask for more chapters, the whole manuscript, take highlights out for a press release, use as an intro for a public talk about the story)

     

Publishers and agents will have their own parameters about word count but generally a synopsis is somewhere between 300-600words. 

When crafting the synopsis, remember to regard it as a piece of creative writing, not just as a piece of information to accompany your work. In that sense it's often effective to write the synopsis in a voice close to the voice of the story itself. Don't write about the story in objective terms, e.g. This is a story about... It's unnecessary and just takes up wordcount space. 

Regarding the structure, you could think about it in the following terms:

• start by identifying the central conflicts in the world of the story - what is missing, what is in trouble, at stake, in jeopardy? 
• introduce your protagonist, very brief sketch
• describe how the central conflict impacts on your protagonist, on the other key characters around them. What specific challenges to the characters face
• what agency does your protagonist have to do something about their challenges. What gifts do they have, what abilities (even if they're dormant.) 
• what obstacles are in their way (may - and should - be both external and internal. Internal obstacles would included baggage and unfinished business from the past that still haunts them in the present (backstory.)
• who are their allies, if any. What are their key relationships and how will they be effected by the story's events
• who and what are their enemies
• what is the first step to be taken on the road to meet the challenge
• what are their responses to the first couple of challenges. How do their challenges escalate. What more is put at stake and how. (Their physical safety, their emotional and psychological safety, their morality or ethics)
• what is at stake in the final challenges towards the story's end. What is line up against them (again both external and internal.)
• you can give a hint of the climax, or describe it directly (depending on who the synopsis is for, and what you want that reader to do next). Resist the urge to get too cute, e.g. 'But to find out how it ends, you'll have to read the whole story.' There's no need for that and the voice might put people off.

John Cheever.

Today is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the American writer, John Cheever. Cheever (like Raymond Carver) specialized in the short story, and like Carver he wrote sketches of everyday life. His stories had an elegant simplicity and presented middle class suburbia as a place of sterility and coldness, manicured and polite but often dangerous and destructive to the newcomer or the outsider.

My first exposure to Cheever's haunting storytelling (though I didn't know it at the time) was via the film version of his story 'The Swimmer' starring Burt Lancaster. Cheever's short story had originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine in July, 1964. A man spends the entire story in swimming trunks, stopping in at every house with a swimming pool, telling people he's 'Swimming my way home.' The story starts with the character a braggart and popular wherever he goes, but the closer he gets to home the darker the encounters become and people shun him. None of this is explained in exposition but is shown in small disturbing scenes (coming across a hot dog wagon he knows he owns, which is now in someone else's yard, encounters with people he doesn't remember but they recognize him and shy away.) The final scene of the film when Lancaster arrives home to find it locked and boarded up with a cold wind blowing leaves in icy circles is unforgettable. He slowly sinks to a fetal  position in the doorway.  I was about 7 years old when I saw that and it has stayed with me to this day.

Cheever's original thinking about The Swimmer filled 150 pages of his notebooks, which he whittled down into a short story. In his formative sketches he was thinking of the classical story of Narcissus, who died gazing at his reflection in a pool of water. This becomes a thematic metaphor for the story as a whole.

His stories worked mainly by creating relationships of apparent civility but with worrying undercurrents. In that way he was the precursor to Carver, though Carver's cast of characters were a couple of steps down the social ladder from Cheever's. The magazine format with its generous wordcount allowed Cheever room to develop his narratives beyond the 'slice of life' (which he apparently disliked) into morality tales contrasting characters outer success with inner demons, in deft, subtle strokes.

Among his novels, 'Falconer' (1977) set in a prison, but metaphoric of society as a whole, is a classic.

Here is an article from The Telegraph in the U.K. about Cheever and his legacy.

Some thoughts on point of view

I recently came across an interesting way of thinking about first person point of view by the Australian writer and academic, Dr Anthony Macris.

In his chapter in The Writer's Reader: A Guide to Writing Fiction and Poetry (ed) Brenda Walker, Halstead Press, 2007, pp 67-79, he talks about there being two modes for first person point of view, that of the hero and the witness.

According to Dr Macris, the hero narrator is both 'the perceiving agent and the object of these perceptions' whereas the witness narrator is 'present at all events but doesn't dwell on his/her own actions, focusing on external characters and events.'

He goes on to say:
'The skillful alternation between witness and hero modes is extremely important in first person narration... too much focus on the hero narrator [and] the reader can soon tire of their dominance... If the witness narrator function is... too fragmented and inconsistent, the story can lose dramatic intensity and thematic cohesion. Successful alternation between the two modes... allows the reader to identify strongly with the protagaonist... while also making it possible to present a clearly-drawn set of characters, settings and situations.' (p 69)

This quote made me realise why I've always found some first person narrators really difficult. I often feel as if  they are bashing me over the head with their constant dominance. Mostly I just want them to shut up, e.g. Holden Caulfield, the 16 year old narrator of J D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.


Here is a link to another  interesting article by Dr Macris in the Griffith Review called Creative Writing Strikes Back, in which he mentions some of the problems that can happen for writers if they don't have a good understanding of Point of View.

ANZAC day - a fictional narrative of nation building?

Well, ANZAC day has come and gone for another year and I'm left with an increasing sense of unease.
My unease has been growing for a number of years, concurrent with the increasing popularity of the day and its rituals, especially with the young. I'm not quite sure when I first started to hear, via the media, that New Zealand's  military involvement at  the slaughter that was Gallipoli symbolised the moment we  first became a nation, but it certainly wasn't considered that way when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s.

Many things disturb me about this claim,  not the least because it is based on a view that the ultimate arbiter of nationhood is the (male) experience of war, especially a battle and a war fought in someone else's country. I don't have any issue with people wishing to honour and respect the sacrifices their forebears have made, or with the desire to construct  meaningful narratives about who we were and are, or with debates about what constitutes the basis and nature of our citizenship. What concerns me is who and what are missing from this version, and, to use old-fashioned language, whose point of view is it and whose interests does it serve?

The idea that there is one narrative, and one moment, that defines a person's - let alone a nation's -  identity is ludicrous. Anyone who attempts to construct a narrative is immediately challenged by issues of point of view and perspective. And then there are issues of what to include and what to leave out, what emphasis to give actions or events, what to  hint at or make explicit, what is text and what is subtext.

Surely there are many different narratives that contribute to our sense of nationhood and national identity . One that springs to mind is Archibald Baxter's powerful story of being a conscientious objector in World War 1, We Will Not Cease. His story is as much about courage and sacrifice as are the individual stories of New Zealand and Australian soldiers sent to their deaths at Gallipoli. What a shame we don't have a day to celebrate his perspective.

Here is a link to a book review of We Will Not Cease.

 

Manifestations

I set myself a task over the summer to read a lot more popular fiction action thrillers. I did this with varying degrees of success. Among the works I read a couple of the very popular Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, including the first of the ongoing series, Killing Floor.

Lee Child's novels have become a sales phenomenon, and Child's ability to put a plot line together is an object lesson in managing rising tension and turning points. The character of Jack Reacher is an interesting study in the ways that popular fiction heroes work. There has been a trend in the last thirty years or so, following on from the anti-heroes of film noir and its literary equivalents, for characters to be portrayed as rebels. Reacher represents a popular variant on this type, and the concept of 'portrayed' is important here. He expresses and riffs off of fundamental but seemingly opposing forces. On the one hand he is ex military, which means he represents the father archetype so beloved of the old westerns and male fiction,(strength, honesty, integrity, physical competence, the ability to act - not just talk), and some wider and often murkier manifestations of this archetype (the system, government, power, control, might as the definition of right.) At the same time the 'ex' is crucial. He's not currently 'in' the military. That gives him the edge of the rebel, bucking up against the system. So he has it both ways, and that appeals to conflicting needs within his audience. The need to be part of something bigger, but the need to be individual. The system - vs the lone wolf. Within - without. It is a constant conflict that is intoxicating for readers who want to be both tribal and individualistic.

Books on film theory often call these characters the 'enigmatic outsider.' In general terms the enigmatic outsider isn't the protagonist, as the creation of a protagonist often comes with a need for exhaustive exposition, which kind of kills the enigmatic part. So Reacher is unusual in that respect and Lee Child cleverly keeps his background sketchy. His constant restlessness, and itinerant lifestyle is an effective device to maintain that tension between 'home' (represented by his military background) and the enigma.

There were early manifestations of these characters in the ubiquitous private detectives of noir fiction, Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, for example. They were like the problem child kicked out of the nest (the system) but still trying to do the things the system was set up to do, if it had any god-dammed guts and honesty left (ie: find and bring justice.) Often they were given tragic, or at least dark pasts, conflicts they had to overcome within themselves to overcome the conflicts arising in the plot and relationship lines of the story. The noir P.I.s had an extra edge of unreliability, you never really knew or trusted their motives, or got a sense that they themselves knew. For all his power and decisiveness, Jack Reacher lacks this edge. He fills that gap with extreme violence, metered out to deserving candidates. And for all his scariness, he's really a Sherman tank version of the cosy promise that it'll be alright in the end. That good will win out.

A closer manifestation of the noir detective would be the Dave Robicheaux character from James Lee Burke's stories, but he's still a cop, after all the ruminations and conflicts about the role and meaning of power. Perhaps modern fiction has tipped the enigmatic characters of noir more clearly over to the 'other' side, in characters like Tony Soprano. Instead of a good man in constant conflict with (though using the muscle and lack of morality of ) the bad man inside him we have a bad man who's morality is moment by moment, entirely derived from each situation, each relationship. Constantly demanding we re-frame the whole argument and concept.

I find the hyper violence of the Reacher novels over the top and his all powerful physicality and ability to kill five bad guys without breaking a sweat veers too close to Superman mythology, for me. James Lee Burke's characters are less perfect and stronger for it.

The two action thrillers from my recent sample I found most rewarding were by Michael Connelly. Lost Light and City of Bones. Connelly's characters (including his protagonist, Harry Bosch) strike me as more real, with layers of strength AND vulnerability. There is a lot more ambiguity in his writing. You never know who to trust, and Harry Bosch is just trying to do the best he can in lousy situations - he's not an Old Testament bringer of vengeance. There's no real ambiguity in Harry, but there sure is in the world around him. Who can you trust, and why, and how far?

I could see myself inviting Harry Bosch to dinner and we'd shake our heads at the stuff that's out there. I'd invite Robicheaux, but lock the liquor cabinet. I'm not sure I can see Jack Reacher strongly enough as a real person to even invite him. Anyway, with his lifestyle, where would you send the invitation?

Conflicting emotions.

I recently went to see the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and came out with conflicting emotions. The best moments were excellent, but there were weaknesses too. The strengths ( some biting humour in the dialogue, some poignant performances, by Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Celia Imrie and Judi Dench.) Weaknesses: I thought the film suffered from too much need to present the quaint India of recent legend, chaotic but happy, personified by the lead Indian character Sonny, played by Dev Patel. I’m more than a little disquieted by indigenous characters acting in ‘type’. Sometimes I wonder if English letters and celluloid still struggles to leave behind Kipling’s cute but paternalistic and patronizing portrayals of natives. It reminds me of what Native Americans sometimes refer to as ‘Chiefing’, getting up in traditional garb, not as an intrinsic cultural statement, but to ham it up for the narrow perspectives of tourists. Sonny’s character and the triumph over odds plotline written for him never rose above stereotype.

That aside, the film is a masterclass in acting. I was reminded for the millionth time what an extraordinary actress Maggie Smith is, and how great actors can rise above limitations in film concepts and scripts. Smith has an ability to portray polar opposites of emotion simultaneously. In this film her words are bitter, cynical and prejudiced, but you can’t hate her because her eyes and her tiny facial gestures betray a terrible vulnerability and sadness that gives you insight into her character.

  

There is a poignant sequence in the film where she speaks to a hotel worker (as the worker is sweeping) not knowing the woman is an ‘untouchable.’ This plays on the painful dynamic of one prejudice (the Indian caste system) clashing with another (old fashioned racism and belief in racial superiority.) In the conversation though, Smith’s character (whose fear of difference informs her racism) lectures the worker on how to sweep, not so much out of prejudice but because she (Smith’s character) was a professional housekeeper all her life. She is then invited to the woman’s home to meet the family. Smith’s character is in a wheelchair much of the time, and she is aided into a chair inside to meet the family. In the scene’s pivotal moment she sees (through an open door) some of the teenagers in the Indian family playing with her wheelchair. She immediately thinks they are trying to steal it and in her terror and vulnerability (she’s lost without the wheelchair) verbally lashes out.  It all comes out. Her fear, her fragility and her racism (she automatically assumes the natives will steal the chair, of course they will.) Her realization that they are only curious is the film’s most painful moment, and her face is riddled with conflict and shame. Her uncompromising attitude as an actress to avoid soft options and warm, fuzzy ‘conversion’ moments gives her portrayal a searing authenticity.     

I was struck also by Judi Dench’s ability to enrich the physical space in a scene. You often hear comments like this: dominate the space, own the scene, which results in histrionics and ‘big acting’ (the lesser moments by Sean Penn or Keira Knightly, for example.) But Dench dominates her scenes with her gracefulness. She has a dancer’s ability to still the viewer’s eye, to not diminish the background but be in symmetry with it. She is able to do so partly because of her beauty, which is not born of some superficial concept of prettiness or niceness but because the authenticity and humanity in her face and movements carry a possibility that within all the crappy choices and consequences we’re faced with, maybe there is still just a sliver of daylight if we have the honesty and guts to search for it. That sliver of daylight, that tiny spark of hope, is what is beautiful, way beyond any airbrushed, market-researched but ultimately saccharine concept of beauty.  

Tom Wilkinson’s story arc is, in contrast to Sonny’s, handled with care and delicacy and devoid of cliché. He plays a gay man immersed in the world of traditional propriety (a high court judge) who ran away from a relationship with an Indian man forty years earlier and has come back to India to find him, to own up to his fear and betrayal. The scene where they meet is deliberately underplayed and totally lacking in syrupy melodrama and music. A small, delicate thing, allowed to play out mostly within the humanity in the audience, not in huge letters on screen. This is the script’s best realized plot and story line. 

So there were some false notes and weaknesses in concept and in the script, but the best of this film made it worthwhile. It struck as the work of film-makers hedging their bets, willing to have the acidic, but very real bone-dry honesty of a Mike Leigh film, but a little afraid to completely leave cosy cliché behind. 

I'm glad I saw it though, for the acting alone.To remind me of how the best acting is a finely honed study and application of craft, that looks accidental.

The art and craft of storytelling: Songs from the Inside

Last Sunday night I was lucky enough to catch the first episode of a new series on Maori Television, Songs from the Inside (8- 8.30pm time slot). The series is based around four musicians - Anika Moa, Ruia Aperahama, Warren Maxwell, Maisey Rika - who are taken into Arahata and Rimutaka prisons to teach songwriting to prisoners.

I've never visited Arohata prison but I have been to Rimutaka so I was interested to see how authentic this first episode was and to see what kind of attitude and tone the programme had.

All I can say is, if you are interested in genuine storytelling, with its roots on, make time for this programme. Each of the musicians seemed humbled by the experience of meeting and connecting with the inmates, and with the task of helping them, through singing and songwriting, to express themselves and share their personal and collective stories.

Watch and learn.

What we miss...

Most of us who write are always grappling with the issue of getting enough time to write. It’s an old question and will always pressure creative artists of any kind, because to create we need to open up a little bubble in the world, space to think, to feel, to connect. But we can’t live permanently in a bubble. 

It’s not just getting time to write either, but time to read. Time to really see what’s in the world, and to hear the sounds around us. Voices, childrens’ laughter, birdsong, wind in the leaves. Or even sounds that clash and clatter. As I write this the garbage truck is making its snail trail up the street, its engine and lifting mechanism overlaying the rattling of cicadas. Then it vanishes and the other sounds come back in. They all have a place, because as both readers and writers those sounds are our context, unasked for, but still welcome. Sometimes we colour our sound context with music of our own choice, perhaps so we can open up that little bubble of art in the world, while we go about our business. But often we just don’t have time to listen.

The video link was filmed at a subway station in Washington D.C. We are all used to buskers as background music, so no one paid particular attention when a man opened a violin case and lifted out an old instrument and began to play. They didn’t notice that he was playing ‘Chaconne’ from Johan Sebastian Bach’s ‘Partita no#2,’ an unusual choice for a subway busker as it is recognized as one of the world’s most challenging pieces. The busker played it through, most people giving him only a glance. Most of those who stopped were children, standing in fascination, as children live much closer to the edge of that bubble than adults do. Then they were dragged away. I mean, how many of us have time, in our busy task-filled day, even if it’s to stop for a minute to listen to Joshua Bell, one of the world’s great violinists, standing in a subway entrance playing Bach on a violin crafted by Antonio Stradivari in 1713, that cost Bell something around US$3.5 million to buy. Those few that did stop, put some change into Bell’s violin case. At the session’s end he had collected $32. (His normal performance fee works out at around $1000 a minute. ) It was part of an experiment by the Washington Post, to see how people would react to great art suddenly in their midst.

The passers by had things to do, as do we all. Perhaps they did though, carry a piece of melody, a couple of tones, the quivering of a violin string’s vibrato. Carried it to their offices and schools and truck cabs and construction sites. Maybe it got into their briefcases, the oil stains on their overalls. We have so much to do now, what we don’t have is time. 

I remember once having a coffee in a food hall and a young woman was sitting amid a group I imagined were her family. She was in tears, they were stonefaced, made no movement or even gesture towards her. Some glanced around to see if others were watching.

The woman kept saying over and over :

‘I don’t want to go. I just don’t want to go.’

Finally a child – none of the adults – stood and leaned against her, their small arm trying to circle her waist.

I had no idea of the context, but I remember it made my coffee go cold. That scene often haunts my writing. A lot of scenes do. Tiny scenes that live in the cracks between one job and another, lie kicked to the edge of the footpath as we rush by. A rare human moment amid the clutter of things.

To connect with art; art created by humans, art out there in the world, don’t forget to try and find those little bubbles, that space you need to breathe. You never know when you’ll come upon moments of great beauty, or tiny tragedy, that remind you you are human. You might even come upon a great violinist playing a 300 year old violin in a subway station foyer on a mid-winter’s morning. You never know.

Shadows cast in the sand.

The American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) employed a process that has been called the Iceberg, as a metaphor for the way stories often work. This is sometimes called the theory of omission, where the deeper story and the moment that revealed it, were addressed obliquely, not directly on the page. The iceberg beneath the waterline is much larger than the iceberg we see, because our first glance is often not of the totality of something, or the angle we first view doesn’t give us a totality. Often we will never see the totality, or any sense of totality is subjective. Hemingway in fact would write the revelation moment then go back and delete it, attempting to leave it hanging in the air around the story. In the shadow places at the story’s edge. See Hemingway’s story ‘Hills Like White Elephants,’ (1927) as an example.

For the writer the page is the place for describing the events, the action, the physicality of landscape and gesture. For getting the dialogue to crackle and parry and simmer. For writer and reader beneath and around what is described lives a shadow landscape, much larger in scope and more powerful in resonance that what you actually read. This process asks questions of what we even mean by reading. It also goes to perception and connection from personal experience.  

What we see at first glance is not always what is really there. In the photo above, from National Geographic, a first glance sees a group of camels, tall, rangy, against a backdrop of sand. But look closer. At the feet of the ‘camels’ are little white lines. A close inspection reveals those white lines are the camels, what we first perceived as the camels are in fact their shadows. The miss-perception is caused by the fact the photograph is taken from directly above, and the time of day gives an angled light so the shadows loom vast on the sand, and we see only a sliver of the actual camels.

But everything we associate with camels, their shape, posture, the sense of being caught mid-step, is captured in their shadows. Our minds’ capacity for shape recognition constructs them as camels. They are camels in that sense.

Some stories operate like those camels and their shadows. You read the story, your eye passes over the text and picks up the movement and gesture, your ear hears the dialogue and arranges the order of sentences and events in a straightforward narrative. But then the text you’ve read begins to fade, or shrink to a sliver and something else appears not on the page but in the space between reader and page. In the places in the reader they share with the writer, with other readers. Sometimes unacknowledged places. Shadows cast in the sand.

And it is the shadow you carry away with you, not the text.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

The past is never dead. It's not even past -  William Faulkner, American novelist (Requiem for a Nun, 1951.)


I was reminded of Faulkner's quote this week amidst the venting of anger in and around television presenter Paul Holmes' article printed in the New Zealand Herald a few days ago. This article has since been 'answered' by activist and politician Hone Harawira in the Herald, here. 


We often see a kind of battle of stories in the media, and in general public discourse, often becoming a fight between whose story carries more weight, whose story should gain them the position of power and primacy. A statement that one narrative trumps another.


I'm not going to go so much into the political rights and wrongs of the arguments here. What does strike me though is that in his vitriol Holmes is evoking the memory of his tupuna (ancestors) and their connection with military service. He is using them as authorities and emotional arbiters, saying he wouldn't take them to a Waitangi Day commemoration because of how he feels they would see it. Firstly the point needs to be made that a great many Maori, in fact tens of thousands of living Maori have tupuna who served in wars New Zealand fought in. Paul Holmes does not have sacrifice stories to himself, as indeed no-one does. 


It is though his right to evoke his tupuna and bring forth their suffering in their time into our time, because one is built from the other. Unfortunately the voice Holmes uses, bordering on rabid, makes this point easier to miss. That is a shame, because in evoking the grief and suffering (and the legacy of that) of his tupuna he is in fact calling on the eternal thread of his whakapapa (approximately - geneology) and speaking of it in a permanent present tense. In doing so, he is in fact coming very close to the process by which the Maori protestors he so aggressively dismisses evoke their own whakapapa and tupuna tane (male ancestors) and tupuna wahine (female ancestors.) 


He is calling on inter-generational grief, as an emotional, psychological and symbolic force in the present. 


If Holmes took the time to think about it he might realize how close he is to the emotional truth within the Maori position and the view of indigenous and minority people worldwide, because it is part of our universality as human beings, as the product of our pasts. As Faulkner said - the past is never dead. It's not even past. 


We are all, in very deep and often unacknowledged ways, largely the products of our pasts, and decisions made in the present and future often evoke our pasts. Context is so much more than we can see with a surface glance at any one moment. Faulkner himself lived in the American deep south, whose economy was built so much on the backs of two hundred years of slavery. It is not a question that Faulkner himself did not keep slaves, because so much of what he had and laid his eyes on in his time was built on the backs of those slaves in their time, and in that sense the separation between times breaks down. 



Indigenous peoples worldwide are so often told to move on, that the past is in the past. But who of us is really separated from those before us, or should ever wish to be. If Holmes feels the presence of his ancestors with him now, I respect that, but he must then respect that others can, will and do do the same. 


Moving on suggests to me themes of survival and growth. Not of denial. 
 
Reminds me of one other quote from William Faulkner. 


Between grief and nothing, I will take grief. 
(The Wild Palms/If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. 1939)


It has taken me a very long time to understand that. 

Happy endings

A friend of mine recently challenged me to write a short story that had a happy ending - just for a change, she said. She is a writer too, currently working on a novel, and part of a writing group I belong to. The particular story of mine that prompted her (humorous) plea - an early draft, I hasten to say - ended with the main character choosing to leave a relationship rather than give up a (neurotic ) way of coping with anxiety.

Both the story and my friend's comments got me thinking about what makes for a 'good' or satisfying ending, especially in a short story, and whether good and happy are the same thing. And, of course, it also made me wonder about what people mean by the terms, happy and ending, - happy ever after? - and once I started thinking about that I realised I had a number of other questions, including who is supposed to feel happy at the end, the character or the reader, and are they the same thing?

Once I'd gone down that road I started thinking about Raymond Carver's stories, none of which are a barrel of laughs. One of my favourite Carver stories is, So Much Water, So Close To Home. The story is not a happy one; it is one of the most powerful and devastating I've ever read. It exposes dehumanising indifference, violence and cruelty, yet it is somehow satisfying. Why? Because, in the end, the woman in the story knows so much more about dehumanising indifference, violence and cruelty, and takes her own small, yet dangerous stand against it. In other words, the character is in an entirely different moral/psychological place at the end than at the beginning. This character movement or development makes me as a reader 'happy' even when the story itself is not. And the reason for this is because in some small way, through identification with the character, I too have gained insight into the human condition, witnessed its horror and glory, and come out the other side changed in some way.

In this week's New Zealand Listener (February 4th, pp35-36) there is an article on Kelly Link, an American short story writer, who is noted apparently (I haven't read her work) for her 'open' endings. I liked her comment that:

"Stories that have too neat an ending, they're very easy to put down and walk away from. I don't want to write stories that feel disposable."

I'm not against stories with overtly happy endings, I'm sure I've read many and probably enjoyed them, its just that I can't remember any of them.

Language matters.

I received an email yesterday from a business website that talked up a concept called 'Killing the Puppies.' This is a reference to a business making sure it analyzes processes and projects to make sure they weren't just 'a good idea at the time' or were once effective but are now just pets, for no good reason.

But look at the term - Killing the Puppies.

Why the use of violent imagery? Is it necessary? I can get what concept they're describing, in plain language and don't need a violent metaphor.There's a very nasty overtone also with the envisioned vulnerability of the puppy, and that can encourage a vicarious sense of power, with the strong (in this case - the violent) overcoming the weak. Non violent, or being incapable of effective violence is often portrayed as weak.

Note it doesn't say 'Kill the Great White Shark' because that screws up the imagery. Okay, a shark wouldn't be a pet, but note it doesn't say Kill the Pitbull either. I suspect that is because that would divide the viewer's desired loyalty. The Point of View being rather unsubtly encouraged here is that OF the Pitbull, of the aggressor. Forces of oppression have known for thousands of years that a quick way to get one group to dehumanize another is to encourage them to create a binary opposition, a them and us. If we are unclear about where the dividing point lies, it's harder for propaganda to take hold.  

When I was in the corporate world in the 90's we were bombarded with 'you want to build Guerilla Salespeople' with a 'take no prisoners' approach. So you could 'make the opposition bleed.' I've read business books that spoke of 'Black Ops' projects and 'Special Forces' marketing, 'command and control' brand management. It's the language of the military, and/or the stylized military whose promise of erasing individual insecurities and doubts via the apparatus of massive force that so many find so seductive.  It smacks of the violence porn of many computer games, where the user becomes First Person Shooter.

Where can this kind of violent imagery in (supposedly) non-violent contexts lead? Have a look at this clip of Richard Fuld, reprehensible former head of Lehman Brothers.

This is almost an unintentional parody of the Gordon Gekko character (a ruthless investment banker) in the 1980's movie Wall Street constantly quoting from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. 

Text in all its forms has a large influence on our worldview and the way we form it. Sometimes the way we form our worldview becomes our worldview - street gang culture for example. Richard Fuld is as clear an example of street gang culture as I can conceive.

There is an uncomfortable stereotypical hyper-masculinity in so much of this kind of language, that of dunderheaded comics and films. Kill is more important that grow, black (as in Black Ops style secrecy) is more important than inclusiveness and consultation.

An individual and a society needs to be aware of where it takes language and lets language and its propagators take it.  I have heard, more than once, sports journalists use the term 'rape and pillage' to describe one team defeating another in a contest.Terms (and concepts) can easily become acceptable if downplayed often enough, usually with an accompanying admonition to 'get a sense of humour.'

As a writer and lifelong avid reader I'm well aware of the power of language. It is a tool, and like any tool can be used for constructive or destructive means and ends.  Think about what kinds of terminology you will and won't accept and pass on to others.

Language matters. Really.  

P.S.
(Dog Whisperers among you will have noted that the second puppy picture is in fact of a pitbull. Confusion of symbolism deliberate.)

Happy New Year

I've been on holiday long enough (and have recovered from the strains of Xmas enough) to start reading more than just whodunits. Came across this wonderful paragraph today on reading and writing (and sentence construction) by an Australian writer, Kevin Brophy, in a book called, The Writer's Reader: A Guide to Writing Fiction and Poetry, edited by Brenda Walker, Halstead Press, 2007. Worth quoting in full.

"Prose lies on the page before us as the sea lies under a great bird flying from continent to continent. The sentence is no more a distinct unit of language than the wave is distinct from the ocean. Sentences of prose move down the page in lines like the waves of the Pacific moving on to the Australian shoreline. They are a surface phenomenon; they tell us something about what might be happening under the surface; they have their own storms and moods; we read them because that is where we birds moving from the continent of birth to the continent of death must feed off what is swimming just below those waves." (p34)

Breaks in the symbolic chain.

One of the most powerful images of the year was the photograph from the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York. The image is of retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis, a career policemen, caught on the other side of the law. The fact that Lewis is in full police dress uniform gives the image extra edge and resonance. It forces us to examine a conflict between a symbol used in two different ways.

Police forces have always been very aware of the symbolic nature of uniforms. The uniforms carry strong implicit messages. The bold deep blue of the NYPD uniform speaks of clarity, strength. It’s not some wishy-washy faded yellow. Men and women of power love deep navy blue too for their suits and blazers. It’s patriarchal, more about the symbol of the father figure as a psychological necessity, than it is specifically about gender. The force that knows more, has experienced more, is clear on issues you might be opaque about. But in the image of Captain Ray Lewis the symbolism becomes blurred, because there’s no apparent dichotomy between the characters in the drama. The man being arrested should look like a man being arrested, not like the policemen arresting him. The upright bearing and dignity of the arrested man also clashes with accepted symbology. He’s supposed to ‘look’ criminal. But he doesn’t. He actually looks to have more authority than those arresting him.

This departure from the familiar chain of symbolism makes us question the context. As it should. Who is in the right? Who has the real authority – authority beyond the functional authority bestowed as a facet of procedure by those in power?

The second image, showing Lt John Pike of the UC Davis police pepper-spraying protestors, also disrupts our familiar symbolic narrative, but in a very different way. The clash here is not within the scene itself, but between the totality of this specific scene and the chain of symbols we have built up as part of the meta narrative. The narrative that says ‘trust in the police force, because they are here to protect and serve.’ Only one side of the forces in conflict here has the symbolic uniform of authority. The other side are dressed like ordinary people. The traditional authority figure also wears protective gear, but there is nothing clearly identifiable in the scene that demands he be protected from. He is standing, they are sitting. He is armed with a disabling device (pepper spray), they are not. There is a gross imbalance of power here, at least in the temporal and physical sense. Who ultimately wins that battle for power has yet to be determined.

Both these images speak well beyond their specific context. They attack the history of the symbols themselves, attack our inner diagrams and associations that go with the symbols. There is a rupture in the chain, a break. Those who trade in symbols, as police forces (and business people in suits, and soldiers and sportspeople do) make use of those symbols to give them authority they may or may not have without them. And when the chain of symbology and the associations the wearers of the symbols need to illicit from the rest of us break, then it begins to unravel. The whole meta-narrative can also unravel. Symbols are double-edged, and the process of symbolism and how it echoes or reflects or impacts upon the free floating threads of associations in our subconscious is impossible to control. This stuff runs deep. Governments have been brought down by a single symbolic moment, or a break in the chain of symbols.


Where will this break lead?

Tiny spaces

Early colour footage from 1939, an audience member at a baseball world series game, set to the music of Thomas Newman. This has a balletic quality, almost dreamlike. A clip to stare at with the volume turned up. As this is filmed a month after the slaughter began in Poland to start WW2, the sense of the simple joy of tribal contests that don't end in bloodshed contrasts with the unseen horror, making the assembled cast unreliable narrators. With that knowledge, the monolithic buildings seem somehow sinister, like prison guards. Sometimes beauty is captured in the tiny space between innocence and terrible truth.

The Velveteen Rabbit

For me, one of the great childrens' stories is Margery Williams' 1922 tale The Velveteen Rabbit. Like many good childrens' stories it's about the world, about all of us.

The voice is perfectly pitched, for the era, and comes alive off the page, begging to be read out loud with verve and rise and fall of voice. Here's a link to an online copy with some superb illustrations. Like some of the best Dr Seuss stories there are pointers in here to human behaviour which reward an adult's reading, while never sacrificing the enthralling style, to keep a young reader engaged.

There were other things in the stocking, nuts and oranges and a toy engine, and chocolate almonds and a clockwork mouse, but the Rabbit was quite the best of all. For at least two hours the Boy loved him, and then Aunts and Uncles came to dinner, and there was a great rustling of tissue paper and unwrapping of parcels, and in the excitement of looking at all the new presents the Velveteen Rabbit was forgotten.


For at least two hours, that says so much.


The story contains all the elements of good fiction - including:

• Character - the Velveteen Rabbit and the Skin Horse are hard to forget. Even the minor characters like the toy motorboat stand out. The Skin Horse reminds me of some of John Steinbeck's later ragged and wandering wise men (e.g. Jim Casey from The Grapes of Wrath.)
• Plot -  the introduction of scarlet fever, which threatens the boy's life - darkens the story and takes it into new and poignant territory. Like all the most effective plot, it develops, raising the emotional stakes at the same time it raises the tension (this is crucial in strong storytelling) and contains subtextual echoes that go way beyond the specific context of the story. 
• Conflict - at the same time the boy is saved, the rabbit is endangered (by the same act) which cleaves a split in the reader's loyalties
• A transcendent scene (best put in either just before the plot climax, or at the emotional climax) - the moment when the Velveteen Rabbit waits, shivering, to be incinerated, thinking of the good times in the past, is heartbreaking. 

I'd advise anyone looking to write for children to study this story. Think about how you might adjust the voice for contemporary audiences, or the plot (do children still relate to fairies?)

The two stories that moved me most from my own childhood were The Velveteen Rabbit and The Lorax (Dr Seuss.) Each generation has its favourites, and it's interesting to think that Margery Williams story predates me by four decades. I guess the best stories really are timeless and always open to contemporary re-assessment and interpretation. I once read an online review of The Lorax by a political conservative who described it as 'tiresome environmental, anti-business agit-prop,'

Jesus wept.

But that's a whole 'nutha story.

Who gets to tell our stories?

All the discussion about Wellington's Wellywood sign brings up deep questions about identify. The controversy touched a raw nerve with many and prompted questions about who gets to define us now, to tell our stories. Symbols are pieces of story, suggest a wider and deeper narrative. The people of Wellington rightly complained about a sign that not only was derivative (Hollywood - Bollywood - Wellywood) but gave out a covert message that the entire city had now been kidnapped by the film industry, in particular Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop. There is a difference between recognition and visual ownership.

Corporate entities (which are what Jackson and Weta are) have many means of public relations and marketing at their disposal, to be bought and paid for. A city and its people are more than just a 'thing' to be captured by business interests. They are a history, a culture, a whakapapa, a million stories that all weave into multi-layered narrative of everyday lives and struggles and challenges.

If a corporate wants to pay to put up a sign, they can, just as any of us can advertise. It's the covert kidnapping of the wider public's identity that bothers me, the automatic association that says that we are all now employees or mouthpieces. It's like the separation of church and state: an individual is free to work for both, to move between both, but does not have the right to force everyone to blur both into one.

It reminds me of Jean Baudrillard's book Simulations, 1981, when he speaks of the four stages of the sign. This is part of a recurring narrative in Baudrillard, which he calls 'the loss of the real,' the view that modern film, television and advertising has led to a loss of distinction between the real and imagined, reality and illusion, surface and depth. (from Barry, 1995).

Baudrillard's four stages/orders consist of:



1) Attempt at realism - a sign (painting, poem, story, film etc) that is made to capture the world as it is

2) A misrepresentation or distortion - a romanticized version, soft focus, or hyped up (an example would be some of the pseudo-heroic and patriotic narratives we're often prompted to adopt)

3) A sign that disguises that there is no sign underneath - where the sign is actually all there is. An example is the Rene Magritte painting seen here. Where the painting on the easel and the view outside are one and the same.

4) A sign that bears no relation to any overt reality at all - e.g an abstract expressionist painting where the connections the viewer makes (if any) are entirely subjective and sometimes come from the unconscious.

In Peter Brooker's book Modernism/Postmodernism, (1992, p.154) he analyses the role in the collective imagination and identity of Disneyland, questioning first whether Disneyland is a sign of Baudrillard's second type. (A misrepresentation.)


All its (the U.S.A's) values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified...digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealised transposition of a contradictory reality. 

But he decides that Disneyland is in fact a 'third order simulation.' A sign which conceals an absence. (Barry, 1995.)


Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it IS the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland... Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real. 

Food for thought.

If nothing else, the whole issue got people talking about ownership and identity and who has the right to define it. So it's served a valuable purpose in the end. 

Here's an article with the two most popular entries for the contest to fill the space overlooking Wellington airport. The 'blown away' version is okay, though I baulk at it being designed by Saatchi and Saatchi. I prefer the Taniwha, at least visually.

But all that begs the question: where did this perceived need for a sign come from? Does there need to be a sign at all.

A grove of hardy trees would do it for me. Or just the hillside.

Astroturing: narrative in disguise

Surfing around various blogs and Facebook pages recently, especially to do with political issues, I notice that every now and then a poster will arrive on the scene and begin defending businesses or politicians or demographics with great fervor. This is often suddenly accompanied by related articles, charts, graphs, a wealth of links that seem to materialize very quickly. In moments like this I wonder if I'm looking at an example of what is called 'Astroturfing.'

Astroturfing (named after the artificial grass) originated as a term used to describe the formation of a grassroots movement of the people to support a particular cause, which turned out not to be grassroots at all, but instead  a covert paid public relations campaign. One famous example was an organization in the U.S.A. called the National Smokers Alliance, which was an ordinary citizens movement fighting for the rights of smokers. But it wasn't. It was set up by tobacco giant Phillip Morris. In China a couple of years back it was revealed the government was paying people to search blogsites and mainstream and social media to post pro-government comments, and/or make posts and comments to steer discussion away from any protest or complaint about government. Legend has it they were paid $0.50c for each positive post, therefore became known as The 50 Cent Party.

It is organized, usually professionally funded and paid, propaganda. 

Another noted example of a different kind of astroturfing was when Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006 an amateur video clip appeared on YouTube lampooning Al Gore and his message. An American journalist, Antonio Regalado, noted that this clip came up first when he did a Google search on Al Gore's name - something that can only happen if someone pays a lot of money. He traced the 'amateur' video back to a major PR firm - the actual client was never identified, but with Gore's anti Greenhouse Gasses message you can make reasonable guesses.Here is a link to the clip, which is still on YouTube.

There has been much speculation that the Tea Party movement in the U.S. is an astroturfed entity.

Pays to look closely at what you read and who is behind the telling. By the way, my opinions are mine alone. No one is paying me. I don't think anyone wants to.

Sons for the Return Home

As part of a course I’ve been teaching in Pacific Literature at AUT I’ve re-read Albert Wendt’s landmark fiction novel Sons for the Return Home. I first read this text when I was in high school in the late 1970’s, which was probably bordering on an act of subversion at that time. The only other NZ work I recall reading in class was C.K. Stead’s Smith’s Dream.  

In the book a Samoan family migrates to New Zealand in the 1960’s (to Wellington) for economic reasons, always planning to return to Samoa with financial security and an increased standing in the local community (as having done well in the Papalagi (White/European) land. This point is crucial, the temporariness of their migration, though it in fact lasted for years. The parents imagine they will return to the same land they left, and that their two sons will fit straight in and somehow become traditional Samoans. This is a pipe dream. As Heraclitus said, ‘You cannot step twice into the same stream.’ The passage of time changes everything. The younger son is soon a hyphenated person, neither wholly Samoan nor a New Zealander. He becomes emotionally and physically involved with a young Papalagi woman, whose parents are an all too common mix of (psychologically unacknowledged) bigotry and themselves still with the strange temporariness of a people who have left the mythical ‘home’ but not quite settled in the new land, even though they were born in it. That both the groups of parents feel ethnical and cultural superiority over the other, is a nice comment on our selective blindness. The Samoan mother’s declaration of all the terrible habits of Papalagi children, then her admission she’s never actually known any, is a microcosm of just how much we take on board the cultural narratives that surround us. The younger son finds when he grows into a young man that he walks with a constant cloud of prejudiced assumptions around him, being constantly assembled into stereotype in the eyes of others.  

Sons for the Return Home is a crucial novel in Aotearoa and the Pacific for several reasons. Firstly it established that Samoan authors had a role to play in creating fiction here, roughly paralleling the rise of the first Maori novels and full short story collections by Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera. Secondly it gave an impression of NZ that was from a source outside of the standard narrative sources. We had had many years of the Eurocentric point of view, with NZ re-cast as a little England (despite the fact the NZ was largely also settled by immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, then later the Dalmations coast in addition to the English). Then the ‘sons of Sargeson’ had given us the viewpoint and vernacular voice of the descendants of British settlers, but now broken free of the sense of being psychologically temporary settlers, or scouts of the motherland. In Frank Sargeson’s work the characters were of the NZ landscape, hewn by it, drawn from it and back to it. But the narrative viewpoint of the novels that followed was still clearly from a Pakeha worldview, and Maori and Polynesian characters viewed as the ‘other’. In New Zealand in the 1950’s and into the 1960’s being an ‘other’ definitely put you into the ‘submerged population groups’ (to use Frank O’Connor’s terminology. See. The Lonely Voice, 1962.)

Wendt’s work viewed New Zealand as a colonising force in Samoa, a new outlook for this country, where we (the general populace) were not that long into the recognition of the British as a colonising force here, as opposed to being ‘home.’ That part of it is still an awakening jolt, the realisation that colonisation isn’t as much about the who as the how. It’s about the supplanting of power, of superimposing a narrative of superiority and primacy, and is not solely Eurocentric in its blindness to indigeneity and existing cultural narratives. Colonialism is a mindset as much as it is military power and entrenching political superiority. Witness the Australian mining industry reps in Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip, with their beer guts and stubbies and jandals and disinterest in the ‘natives.’

Some of the reactions to the novel are now pretty hilarious, in an obnoxious sort of way. One review in New Zealand lamenting that the author felt the need to ‘resort to the apparently obligatory florid ethnic scenes to fill out the book.’ Smarter analyses such as Na Te Morehu said ‘Sons, like Witi Ihimaera’s groundbreaking story collection, Pounamu Pounamu, “rips away the covers of niceties” and looks at the sustaining and confining aspects of nostalgia for a mythicised past and home.’ (Sharrad, 2003). 

The book’s strongest moments for me are its most subtle. The protagonist’s father's shock on the boat journeying to New Zealand at seeing two crewman having illicit sex in a lifeboat (metaphorically his fear that his conservative family is about to ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.) The scene where the young boy is made to kill the pig at a feast, and goes through a maelstrom of emotions. The sequence where the two boys save an old man picking over a rubbish dump from being beaten up by bullies and their disbelief that a Papalagi elder could be treated like this. At other times the protagonist as a young man sometimes feels a bit too cool, a young man’s projection of the romantic view of the existentialist loner always swinging his jacket over his shoulder and leaving.   

The New Zealand Wendt was describing was circa late 1960’s, when Samoans were often spoken of as if characters from Kipling’s jungles, with a searing mix of tut-tutting patronisation and outright contempt. But that’s trap set for us by history, this sense that we’ve evolved way beyond that. It is not an invitation for us in 2011 to get cosy and comfortable in leaving those days behind. To do so would be to ignore the warnings of this novel. The story is also as much about class conflict  and inter-generational conflict (which was of earthquake proportions in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s) as it is about ethnic and cultural conflict. 

Sons for the Return Home is a brave book by a brave writer who has shown courage and honesty for decades now. I recently read an obituary for a noted business figure that said that the figure ‘was a man of courage.’ A closer reading saw that said businessman in fact always stood up for the apparatus of power and those who held it, for entrenched privilege. To see such shooting from behind mile-high sandbags as courageous is ridiculous. It takes courage to stand against power, to deconstruct the myths of not one society but two, to rattle the bars around you.      

Continuing Education Summer school

For those of you in Auckland the Auckland University Continuing Education Department is running their annual Summer School at the Epsom campus in January 2012. They are offering short courses (up to a week long) in various forms of creative writing.

Here's a link to the general brochure with all the various classes.

I will be teaching a week long workshop in the Novel: From Conception to Completion. It is an intensive interactive workshop looking at all aspects of writing a novel. The format includes mini-lectures, readings from selected texts to illustrate craft points, class discussions, class writing, then feedback and analysis sessions. It's for anyone considering writing a novel and wanting to get a solid grouding in the form and its facets.

AUT writing competition on again...

The third annual Auckland University of Techology Creative Writing competition is now open for entries. Here is a page with all the entry information.

Nb: Where it says entries are limited to unpublished authors only, the definition of 'published' that that implies includes e-books where the book is on sale to the general public. Check with them or at their Facebook page here if you're unsure.

I could certainly use the I-Pad2, they have as a prize.