Monthly Archives: November 2013

GeekWorld, Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Still Plugging Along

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Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

Working through the revisions in Missing, having fun, surprising myself.  About a third of the way into the manuscript, though the later chapters have more work than what I’ve done so far.  Ways of knitting themes and character development with the narrative come more easily at this stage.

Got a new piece of software today, Dramatica Pro.  I’m hoping it will help me deepen my work while making it more exciting.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  It’s supposed to take a long time to learn.

Five more verses of Ovid.  These verses had a textual problem that had me digging around in the Oxford Classical Text’s version.  It’s supposed to be the best manuscript available now.  The Metamorphoses presents certain problems since it’s oldest manuscript dates from the 9th century, seven to eight hundred years after it was written.  The Aeneid, for example, has some fourth century manuscripts, still within the time of the Roman Empire.

And finished up the next to last poet of ModPo. I’ll finish tomorrow and start on my assessments on Friday.  Yeah.

Art and Culture, Latin, MOOCS, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Just Glad For Them To Be Over

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Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

Finished the quick page through of Missing and have decided on key steps to take next. There will be some formatting, substantial rewriting at the end, amplification of descriptions in certain parts and a bit of rearranging.  My goal is to finish before we leave for Denver.

My capacity to translate while “in” the Latin seems to be growing.  In the passage from today Jupiter is very mad and has decided to destroy the mortal race.  Which he will do, later on in the book.  How?  By means of a flood.

I’m down to the last two poets in ModPo, plus the four assessments of other’s writing assignments.  After two and a half months of considerable work in ModPo and Modern/Post Modern, I’m experiencing that end of the quarter blah.  I don’t really want to finish the work, but I’m going to because I’ve invested so much now.  I get this filled up feeling, brought on by choices I’ve made, yes, but it’s still there.

These were two really good courses and worth the time and effort, more than repaying the work.  Just glad for them to be over.

Writing

Rewriting is Writing

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Once more into the breech. Or, the revision.  Something feels odd, but I’m enjoying the revision.  I didn’t believe it before, but the writing is in the rewriting.

I read somewhere that there are two types of writers, ones who plan, plot, outline and those who discover their story as they write.  I’m of the latter camp once I get going.  I do a good bit of research and I sketch out on a large pad the general flow, big ideas, things I don’t want to forget; but, then I dive in and start writing, see where the process takes me.

This means I produce a first draft that is, in effect, my outline.  Somewhere in there is the story and it may not be the story I thought I was writing.  Or, as in the case of Missing, it is the story I thought I was writing, but a lot of other cool ideas occurred to me as I wrote and I added those.  Discovering them along the way, they just seem worth sticking in.

Revising is, at least in part, identifying those parts and taking them out.  In this instance I will probably be able to use most of them in the next book, Loki’s Children, but it could well be that they would go into a file and never again see a page or screen.

Revision though is additive as well as subtractive.  There’s not only the Michelangelo act of paring away the words that aren’t the story.  There is also the painterly act of filling blank portions of the canvas, balancing the picture, making the colors pop.  Both of these come into play during revision.  Anyhow, I’d better get to it right now.  Later.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Photography, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

 

The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

(Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)

Art and Culture, Writing

Missing found.

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Samhain                                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Missing, the 4th revision, is at home now, having had its beta reading.  That means I’m taking the manuscript up today, seeing what to do, how to hone it one more time. Revision jumps to the front of the line for time, so the Latin will move to 11:00 a.m. and ModPo, this last week, to the afternoon.

There was an interesting perspective on revision I saw last week.  Something like: revision’s not so bad because you know you already have a novel.  True.  And I have few more lying around, too.

Having the ability to arrange my days around the growing season, my writing, the Latin and, now, MOOCs, has made it so I’ve never missed my docent work at the MIA.  Too big a time suck.  How to add art back into my life at that level of intensity, though, still eludes me.  That I miss, the intense immersion in the world of art.  I don’t miss the driving, the tour preparation, the tours.

And now, back to Missing.

 

MOOCS, Poetry

Conceptual Poetry

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Samhain                                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

if every word spoken in new york city daily
were somehow to materialize as a snowflake,
each day there would be a blizzard.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Soliloquy.  Postscript

 

The last week of ModPo.  The conceptual poets.  The book from which the quote above comes, Soliloquy, is every word the poet, Kenneth Goldsmith, spoke in a whole week.  He wore a microphone, recorded his speech, then sat down and transcribed it.  A lot of work.  Not as much work, however, as another work of his, Day, in which he transcribed every word in one day’s New York Times.  A 1,000 page book.

Christian Bok, a Canadian poet, took seven years to complete his project, Euonia.  In Euonia he writes 5 chapters, each of which had to have a banquet, an orgy, a feast, a voyage, refer to the act of writing and, most improbably, use only words containing only one vowel, the same vowel, 98% of those words available.  There is a bit more to Euonia, which means beautiful thinking and is the shortest word in the English language that uses all the vowels.

These are highwire acts of virtuosity and the real creative act is in the concept, especially in Goldsmith.  The concept–what would every word in one edition of the New York Times look like transcribed into a linear text and bound in a book look like?–was the creative moment.  The act of fulfillment, the days and weeks of transcription, is either non creative or uncreative.

Interesting stuff.  I’m more with this than I was with the Chance poets of last week.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Memories, Third Phase

Destabilizing. And That’s OK.

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Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

A further extrapolation on the narrative fallacy and the self.  (see post below)  This notion, destabilizing as it is, makes sense to me. Which is ironic if you get the gist here.

It helps explain the existential panic I sometimes feel when my mood darkens, sometimes with a known trigger, sometimes not.  Yesterday was such a time for me.  When I have conversations about my work, Missing in this case, the potential for a seismic tremor heightens.  Of course, these tremors, unlike earth bound temblors, can produce good shakes and bad shakes.

Stefan’s careful analysis of what he felt worked and what didn’t, which I appreciated, especially in the detail and clarity which he offered so freely, unsettled me.  Geez, if this much still needs to happen and this is the 4th draft, what’s wrong with me?  WRONG.  OH.  I’VE FELT WRONG BEFORE. AND AHA THIS PROVES THIS OTHER TIMES RIGHT.  WHAT WERE THE OTHER TIMES?  UHH.  CAN’T REMEMBER EXACTLY, BUT THE FEELING, THE FEELING’S THE SAME.  ISN’T IT?

This went on as I drove away from his house.  I would remember the tell yourself this is a good workout, that you’re not tired article I read in the New York Times yesterday so I would tell myself that this was temporary, not anchored, that it was good to get feedback, that I was having a good day.  I had a friend who cared enough to be straight with me.  oops.  felt bad.  I’m having a good day, driving in the city.  There’s Knox Presbyterian, “living the obedient life”, yep, still conservative.  Need some tea, Verdant’s all the way over in Seward, but, hey.  The Teashop is just ahead on Lyndale.  Oh, good, I’ve never followed through on my writing, never got published, never tried hard.  Never. Never.  Never.  Never.  Here I am 66 and I’ve bounced from this to that.  Bad.  Wrong. Not followed through.  Old now and not ever going to follow through.  Always bad, wrong.  Wait.  There’s the Teashop.  I’ll buy tea here, not drive all the way over to Seward then have to loop back to Kramarczuk’s.  After the teashop.  Bought a half an ounce of tea for $25.  Stupid.  Hey, I can just loop around, no cars in the lane going the other way on Lyndale.  Oh.  Didn’t look behind me in my own lane, guy lets me go.  Maybe I’m too old to drive.  How will I know?  Bad.  Wrong.  

Finally, I talked myself into the moment.  Cut the loop.  The wind drove the golden leaves, the maple leaves, they are golden.  They swirl up in the air, blown high, come down.  Fall.  This is fall and it’s happening right before my eyes, as I eat this Italian sausage, which is not so hot, still I’m right in the middle of this wonderful seasonal transition.  I’m in this moment now, neither bad nor good, just here.  Part of another fall.  It’s come again, as it has come before and will come again.  And I will be in it, part of it.  Neither bad nor good.  Right nor wrong.  I calmed down, my center returned and the jaggedy feelings left my body, those tensed muscles relaxing.  

The feeling tone remained, like a bad taste, and tried to reassert itself, grind itself into the wormhole that is a certain narrative arc about my self. Finally, the arc I prefer, the one that lets me move forward, not get stuck, took hold.  I had woven my narrative around this temporary dis-ease and let it be.  Part of my life, yes, but not all of it.  Whew.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Writing

The Narrative Fallacy

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

(sarah fishburn)

The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.

Great Wheel, Our Land and Home, Science, Weather +Climate

Asleep

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Samhain                                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Another implication of the fallow season had escaped me, at least at the level Jim Gilbert describes in a recent phenology column in the Star-Tribune:

“Hibernation is a winterless life chosen by reptiles, amphibians, insects and some mammals. During the winter untold millions of animals — including toads, frogs, salamanders, snapping turtles, garter snakes, bats, woodchucks and mosquito larvae — are hibernating across Minnesota.”

We often miss the warm period lives of these creatures because many of them are small, secretive and prefer to remain well away from humans.  Their winter lives, in the millions, untold millions Gilbert says, never massed together in my mind.

(this wonderful piece by Travis Demillo.)

Walking in our woods right now there are thousands of salamanders, toads, frogs, garter snakes, woodchucks, various insects, ground squirrels and gophers in a state of suspended animation, dreaming small animal dreams until the weather becomes more suitable for their life again next year.  It gives the woods a haunted, Snow White sort of atmosphere with so many of its active and vibrant lifeforms stilled to the point of coma.  And by intention.  Well, evolutionarily adapted intention that is.

Here’s a lifted glass to their long night, a safe sleep and a welcome return.

 

General

Grand Round

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Samhain                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

Back from Stefan and Lonnie’s with new things to ponder about this draft of Missing.  After their house, I went to the Tea Shop and picked up some white jasmine and some white tea grown on Oahu.  The owner of the tea shop told me an interesting video clip he’d seen on Youtube about a native Hawaiian who catches wild pigs (a major environmental problem in Hawai’i left over from the days of supplying whaling ships) and castrates them.

The Tea Shop said the Hawaiian in the video was, “The slowest knot tier I’d ever seen.  He finally got the knot done, finished the job and the pig woke up.  He stood on the wire cage and released the boar.  That pig really wanted to get him.”  I imagine so.

After the Tea Shop, I drove on Hennepin to Kramarczuk‘s where I picked up a pound of kielbasa links and a pound of Moroccan lamb links.  By this point I was pretty hungry so I went into the restaurant and ordered an Italian sausage sandwich with sauerkraut.  Hmmm.  sausage sandwich sauerkraut.  A little Germanic-flavored alliteration .  The Italian sausage was lacklustre, but hunger made it good.

Lonnie and Stefan live in Edina on Minnehaha Creek, the Tea Shop is on Lyndale not far from where the French Bakery used to be and Kramarczuk’s is just into Northeast over the Hennepin bridge east of downtown.  The Spectacle Shoppe, my last stop was further to the east and north on Silver Lake Road in New Brighton.

Reading glasses.  Because my primary correction is for far vision, I’ve never bought prescription reading glasses before but my ophthalmologist thought they would help me. I found a nice tortoise shell pair, round.

At that the point the circle I had been making started to close on its final quarter, the trip home.  This trip used map memories going all the way back to my days in seminary.  I took Stinson Boulevard into New Brighton, then Silver Lake north.  A church that used to be part of my responsibility in Northeast now has a green crescent moon and star in place of the cross.  Urbanization and globalization coming together on Broadway.

Now I’m home.