Flashbacks, J.K. Rowling, and Kemble Scott

I once heard a literary agent refer to “flashbacks” as “the F word.” Why do they get such bad press? Could it be that writers spend more time thinking about the past than normal people do, with the result that flashbacks seem more naturalistic to the average writer than to the average reader? For whatever reason, writers are obliged to go sparingly on them.

The Harry Potter movies treat flashbacks as a kind of “special effect” – past memories crucial to the plot are extracted, seething, from the relevant wizard's forehead with forceps-like tools, and dropped into some kind of vessel. Harry then has to stick his head underwater to witness scenes from Voldemort's childhood. My daughter tells me nothing quite like this happens in J.K. Rowling's books, but then, I guess books can't really have “special effects.”

One thing writers can do is to try and integrate a flashback seamlessly into a character's thought process. Kemble Scott's The Sower contains one of the most perfect flashbacks of this kind that I know. Bill Soileau, having been infected with a cure for AIDS that can only be transmitted sexually, is obliged to have sex with as many people as possible. Although homosexual, Soileau often has to “cure” women. In order to get aroused on one such occasion, he recalls a sexual experience from his past -- a rare case of a character having a good plot reason in the present for meticulously reliving an event from long ago. The remembered event gives the reader fresh insight into Soileau, so that a scene that might otherwise be primarily comical also becomes poignant.

I'm going on a long bike ride today, most of which I will probably spend flashbacking, as is my wont -- then if I survive this experience, at 7.30 pm I hope to make it to the official hardcover launch of Kemble Scott's The Sower at The Booksmith.

Thinking is Like a River

Start reading a journal you wrote a decade or two ago, and within a few pages, you'll find ideas you could have sworn you only came up with in the last few days or weeks, albeit slightly differently formulated.

You dig yourself into a rut. It becomes your world, a riverbed that your thoughts rarely overflow.

Didn't Ezra Pound say somewhere that, as we get older, we discover more and more how true were the things we believed when we were young? This probably has to do with selective perception. Darwin wrote in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs, since otherwise he knew they would disappear from his mind.

“As I'm sure you know, water always picks the shortest route to flow down. Sometimes, though, the shortest route is actually formed by the water. The human thought process is a lot like that.” -- Haruki Murakami, “Where I’m Likely To Find It.”

John Patrick Shanley's “Doubt”

For an acting class, a friend of mine has been studying the role of Sister Aloysius in “Doubt.” While helping her learn her lines, I had to read over and over Father Flynn's part in the penultimate scene, the play's final confrontation between Flynn and Aloysius. For me, Flynn's behavior in this scene conclusively establishes his guilt, but my friend came to the opposite conclusion.

Watching a play, we've only surfaces to judge from, as when watching a jury trial, that fundamental Anglo-Saxon institution. The prosecution tells a story. The defense tells a story. The jury decides between these stories according to what are, ultimately, aesthetic criteria – plausibility, consistency... the same factors according to which we believe or withhold belief when contemplating a work of art.

My verdict of guilty is based only on reading the text of “Doubt." If I watched an actor performing the role of Flynn, I might well be led in a different direction. A single fleeting facial expression could well make all the difference. Bridgette Redman indeed has offered three different verdicts for three different performances of the play.

Like David Mamet's “Oleanna,” “Doubt” is designed to leave the jury split, but “Oleanna” was intended to evoke a different response from men than from women. It's less clear along what lines “Doubt” tends to divide people.

Fiction and Risk Avoidance

Evolutionary psychology is quite good at explaining why someone who's just watched “Jaws” is disinclined to take a dip. In the Stone Age, a recent image in your mind of someone being eaten by a shark would have justified your avoiding the water for a while. Presumably our conscious mind knows a swimming pool has no sharks in it, but may struggle to overrule our unconscious mind, which merely beams us the “water”/ “shark” association.

Copycat suicide epidemics, like that reportedly inspired by Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, are harder for the evolutionary psychologist to explain. Apparently though, it's historically debatable whether that book actually incited a suicide epidemic. And R. F. W. Diekstra reports in “Suicide and its prevention: the role of attitude and imitation,” that when she looked for evidence that Angie's suicide attempt in the British soap opera “Eastenders” led to increased suicides in the UK, she couldn't find conclusive evidence for that either. Disappointing, for those of you who might want your writing to inspire suicide epidemics.

Do people who've just seen a movie with a happy ending feel more optimistic about their life than people who've just seen a movie with a sad ending? This would be a straightforward experiment to do -- you'd just need to make a little movie with two alternative endings, and hand out a bunch of questionnaires.

Daniel Gardner, in The Science of Fear, says there isn't much experimental evidence yet on how fiction impacts risk avoidance. The one example he gives is Anthony Leiserowitz's survey of Americans who saw “The Day After Tomorrow,” a disaster movie about a global warming-triggered shutdown of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation system, leading to a new global Ice Age. Americans who'd seen this movie proved more likely to consider a catastrophe of this kind probable. Gardner notes, “The effects remained even after the numbers were adjusted to account for the political leanings of respondents,” but I still find this result a bit unsatisfying, since movies of this kind indiscriminately mix fiction and nonfiction... I'd be more impressed if it could be demonstrated that readers of Stephen King's novella “The Langoliers” showed increased wariness around beach balls...

Cynthia Ozick's "Actors"

The protagonist of this story is “Matt Sorley, born Mose Saducca,” a mostly-out-of-work Brooklyn actor of Sephardic stock, whose wife Frances composes crossword puzzles.

“It wasn't clear whether he was actually acting all the time (Frances liked to accuse him of this)...”

Matt finds a role in an adaptation of "The Yiddish King Lear," a rewriting of an 1892 play from the great era of Yiddish theater. The director enthuses:

“It's the largeness – big feelings, big cries. Outcries! The old Yiddish theater kept it up while it was dying out everywhere else. Killed by understatement. Killed by abbreviation, downplaying. Killed by sophistication, modernism, psychologizing, Stanislavsky, all those highbrow murderers of the Greek chorus, you see what I mean?”

The playwright is “the daughter of one of those pioneer performers of greenhorn drama; the old man, believe it or not, was still alive at ninety-six, a living fossil...” Which is to say that the old man comes from Ozick's generation of American Jews, who learned Yiddish when it was still a living language.

Matt feels he's doing a good job getting into character as “the Lear of Ellis Island” until the nonagenerian, the living fossil, lets him him know he's no Jacob Adler.

Matt's humiliation brings to mind a joke in “Envy; or Yiddish in America,” a story Ozick wrote decades earlier. The joke is about a poet from Zwrdl who sells his soul in installments, in order to attain mastery of language after language, only to find that his writings are destined for rejection and oblivion in all languages. Among the warnings of “Actors” is that we can go through life playing role after role without ever finding an authentic one.

Google Books Settlement Deadline Approaching

Reminding all published authors: if you choose to opt out of the Google Books Settlement, you have until Friday, September 4th, 2009 to do so, otherwise you automatically get opted in. Or if you choose to opt in, September 4th is your deadline to file an objection, to submit a statement disagreeing with some aspect of the settlement.

"Google is trying to monopolize the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News. “If this deal goes ahead, they're making a real shot at being 'the' library and the only library." Some of the risks to libraries are discussed at the library law blog.

Parts of the proposed settlement make sense – making more out-of-print books available on-line appears to be in the general interest. Other parts not so much – it seems weird that a ruling by a New York district court should prevent authors overseas from suing Google for U.S. copyright infringement. Inkling Books have the best collection of links I've managed to find about the Google Books Settlement. From their site -- "Because of this broad reach, drastically reducing the copyright protection accorded virtually every writer in the world, the response from overseas may well determine whether a federal district court judge in New York City approves this settlement or rejects it as overly broad and a violation of the international copyright treaty obligations the U.S. has made with almost every other country in the world."

According to Eric Zohn, an attorney in business affairs at William Morris, “It’s like a legislative change. Under copyright law, you don’t have anything without express written consent from the copyright holder. Now the court is saying Google is free to sell your book unless you expressly tell them not to.”

Michelle Richmond has a piece up making the point that not many authors could afford to sue Google anyway, hence shouldn't mind giving up the right to sue Google. But she also expresses the disquiet most authors must feel about such an unprecedented text grab -- “My concern would be that Google Books may work in some way as a portal to bigger, more insidious practices that we haven't yet quite envisioned...”

It's not easy to trust a company with a motto like "don't be evil..."

Unsuspected Truths, Surprise Resolutions

Rilke wrote, “And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return."

In other words, it's the impressions that have sunk out of your conscious into your unconscious mind, and then risen to consciousness again, that might be useful to you as a poet.

Evelyn Waugh may have meant something analogous when he defined fiction simply as “experience totally transformed.”

V.S. Naipaul has written of his reinvention of himself as a travel writer -- “... that was another kind of writing, another skill. It could be as taxing as fiction; it demanded in some ways an equivalent completeness of man and writer. But it engaged another part of the brain. No play of fantasy was required; the writer would never regard with wonder what he had drawn out of himself, the unsuspected truths turned up by the imagination.”

My sense is that fictional events feel true as long as they've emerged from the unconscious, cf. Robert Burton -- which is the disadvantage of outlining novels.

Samuel R. Delany has commented on this phenomenon too --,

“Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction, it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader, coming, in imagination and through the story process, only a page or a paragraph or a word before its actual notation.”

“On the other hand, those stories that make us say, 'Well, that's clever, I suppose...,” but with a certain dissatisfied frown (the dissatisfaction itself, impossible to analyze), are often those stories worked out carefully in advance to be, precisely, clever.”

Deepening the Mystery + InsideStorytime SPIRIT

Flannery O’Connor said the task of a fiction writer is to deepen the mystery.

Raymond Chandler at twenty-three, writing in surprisingly Chestertonian mode in his essay “Realism and Fairyland," wrote that "the spirit of an age is more essentially mirrored in its fairy-tales than in the most painstaking chronicle of a contemporary diarist.” It's fascinating to me, incidentally, that Raymond Chandler and P. G. Wodehouse went to the same English preparatory school. Both went on to create worlds that are too aesthetically perfect to be counted as realist...

Melanie Rae Thon – “My wise friend Mark Robbins told me that writing is like prayer, ‘the dedicated concentration of your being on that which will help you become the person you know you should be.’”

On a lighter note, here is a review that 7,743 of 7,980 Amazon reviewers found helpful. Tonight (August 20th 2009, 6.30 - 8.30 pm, at Cafe Royale, 800 Post Street, San Francisco) InsideStorytime will try and go all spiritual on you . Jonathon Keats, shown here performing at Kepler's, will read from The Book of the Unknown. Also participating will be Stan Goldberg, Jenesha de Rivera, Andrew Dugas, and Paula Hendricks. Tell us you heard about the event from this blog and we'll waive the customary $3-$5 cover charge.

Some Art Market Psychology

We know what we like -- but not why. The part of us that comes up with rationalizations for what we like is not the same part of us that does the liking. The phrase “I don't know a lot about art, but I know what I like” might translate roughly into “There is little information about art criticism in my cortex, but plenty in my limbic system.”

James Elkins, one of our most fascinating writers about art and visual stuff generally, wrote a fine book called Why are Our Pictures Puzzles? about the fact that it's only recently, in historical terms, that individual works of art have been felt to require prolonged wordy explication. Tom Wolfe wrote in The Painted Word that “Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other words exist only to illustrate the text."

"Verbal” might be a better word than “literary” here. The word “concept” in “concept art” has some of the same connotations as the word “concept” in “high concept,” suggesting something not emotive and visceral, but calculated and blurby.

Don Thompson, in The $12 Million Dollar Shark, quotes some art dealer advice from Howard Rutkowski -- “Never underestimate how insecure buyers are about contemporary art, and how much they always need reassurance.” Can it be that these buyers do know a lot about art, but do not know what they like?

I will close with a passage from V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World --

“The art collectors we know about and envy are the successful ones, like those who a hundred years ago bought Van Gogh and early Cézanne for very little. The people we don't know about from that period are the people who – perhaps with equal passion – collected works by contemporaries who have faded. I once asked a London dealer about such collectors. Did they get to know at a certain moment that they had been wrong? The dealer was unexpectedly vehement. Bad collectors, he said, were a type: they believed in themselves more than in the art they paid for.”

Secret Sharers in a Jolly Corner

Cynthia Ozick's story “Dictation” creates a fictional relationship between two real women -- Theodora Bosanquet, the secretary of Henry James, and Lilian Hallowes, the secretary of Joseph Conrad.

By the story's end, Bosanquet has entered into a lesbian relationship with Virginia Woolf, although since Woolf is identified only as Leslie Stephen's daughter “Ginnie,” inattentive readers may fail to identify her. Bosanquet and Woolf really did correspond -- Bosanquet's "Henry James at Work" was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press -- but the lesbian relationship part is Ozick's invention.

The story's main event occurs in the late winter of 1910, the time Virginia Woolf once suggested as the approximate moment when human character changed. Having belatedly made this connection, I find myself wondering what other literary references I've missed. What happens in “Dictation” is that Bosanquet persuades Hallowes to exchange, without their Masters noticing, lines from two stories, James's “The Jolly Corner” and Conrad's “The Secret Sharer.”

Could one realistically substitute, without being detected, lines from a third-person story set in New York and a first-person story set off the coast of Siam? When Ozick's Hallowes asks as much, Ozick's Bosanquet replies, “What we mean to search for are those ruthless invokings, those densest passages of psychological terror that can chill the bone. Pick out a charged exactitude, tease out of your man the root of his fertility --”

It's a powerful premise for readers who care enough about James and Conrad to feel a transgressive thrill at the thought of this covertly homoerotic exchange. The image of cross-pollination partly works by making us think about what kinds of influences James and Conrad actually exerted on each other -- it helps that both stories involved feature mysterious doubles. "Dictation" is a rich reading experience, provided the reader is fascinated by James and Conrad to begin with -- I'm left, in the spirit of Pierre Menard, to try reading Conrad as if he were James and vice versa, and to wonder what subsequent tricks Bosanquet and Woolf might have gotten up to...

Generational Bias

Robert B. Ray, in his book How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, provides this 1868 quote from Théophile Gautier --

“Faced with this paradox in painting, one may give the impression – even if one does not admit the charge – of being frightened lest one be dismissed as a philistine, a bourgeois, a Joseph Prudhomme, a cretin with a fancy for miniatures and copies of paintings on porcelain, worse still, as an old fogey who sees some merit in David’s Rape of the Sabines. One clutches at oneself, so to speak, in terror, one runs one’s hand over one’s stomach or one’s skull, wondering if one has grown pot-bellied or bald, incapable of understanding the audacities of the young… One reminds oneself of the antipathy, the horror aroused some 30 years ago by the paintings of Delacroix, Decamps, Boulanger, Sheffer, Corot, and Rousseau, for so long excluded from the Salon… Those who are honest with themselves, when they consider these disturbing precedents, wonder whether it is ever possible to understand anything in art other than the works of the generation of which one is a contemporary, in other words the generation that came of age when one came of age oneself… It is conceivable that the pictures of Courbet, Manet, Monet, and others of their ilk conceal beauties that elude us, with our old romantic manes already shot with silver threads.”

Gautier's gut feeling was that Courbet, Manet, Monet etc. -- painters whose work at that time was too controversial to be admitted to the Salon -- were not “art.” But remembering how obdurate his elders had been, back when he himself was defending Delacroix, Gautier could ponder at an intellectual level whether part of the problem might not be some kind of age-related decline in neuroplasticity. Extending this line of thought further, Gautier might have considered that he was probably also biased against Jacques-Louis David...

I bring this up when guys in their forties tell me popular music stopped being good in the 1980s, or when guys in their fifties tell me popular music stopped being good in the 1970s. Usually what this gets me are disgruntled skeptical codgerly looks... Most people have some degree of bias towards the cultural output of their own generation: this is easiest to spot in people from generations other than our own. Nowadays someone walking through the Louvre from David to Delacroix to Degas to Dufy might perceive mostly continuities and not suspect how much generational conflict was going on...

Poe Lives! Goth Hop

From Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa --

“'Well,' I said, 'we have had, in America, skillful writers. Poe is a skillful writer. It is skillful, marvelously constructed, and it is dead.'”

I read this the other day, and had difficulty figuring out what Hemingway was getting at, with respect to Poe. The “dead” part, that is, not the “skillful” part. I think to understand it you have to imagine your way back to the 1930s, when Poe would have felt a lot more dated than he does now. Maybe the deal is that if people remember you eighty years after you die, you seem dated, but if they remember you another eighty years after that, you seem timeless.

Of course, some people still hold it against Poe that he wasn't very literary -- or wasn't until Baudelaire decided he was. But as a rule of thumb, anyone who's still being read two hundred years after they're born counts as literary. I'm still soliciting comments on "The Cask of Amontillado" by the way.

Tonight (Friday August 14th 2009) we San Franciscans will celebrate Poe's two hundredth birthday (a few months early) at the Goth Hop, a pre-Litquake fund-raiser event, at the Verdi Club, from 8:30 p.m. until the witching hour, with absinthe bar courtesy of Le Tournment Vert absinthe, telltale heart beatboxer, and a mosh pit complete with pendulum. Well maybe I made that last part up.

Note that the year 2099 will be the date both of Litquake's hundredth anniversary and of Hemingway's two hundredth birthday – according to my theory, Hemingway will seem less dated then than he does now -- so anticipate some serious matador action...

Biological Constraints on our Ability to Know What we Know

In On Being Certain, Robert Burton writes, “Since beginning this book, I have increasingly found myself asking a single question of any idea – be it the latest scientific advances, a pop psychology book, or personal opinions (mine as well as those of others): Is the idea consistent with how the mind works?”

One book Burton endorses is Timothy Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves, from which he quotes the following passage -- “The bad news is that it is difficult to know ourselves because there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no matter how hard we try... Because our minds have evolved to operate largely outside of consciousness, it may not be possible to gain direct access to unconscious processing.”

Burton comments, “Wilson suggests that we are better off by combining introspection with observing how others react to us, and deducing the otherwise inaccessible nature of our minds from their responses. If others see us differently than we see ourselves, we need to incorporate this alternative view of ourselves into our personal narrative. He warns us that introspection without looking outward at how others see us can actually be counterproductive.”

The “rational” neocortex sometimes generates good beliefs, sometimes bad; the “emotional” amygdala sometimes generates good beliefs, sometimes bad. On Being Certain warns us that we are more inclined to trust the beliefs that rise from the depths of our unconscious, precisely because these beliefs come to us imbued with a physiological feeling of certainty.

“Blink is summed up simply: use intuition when it makes sense, except when it doesn't.”-- a comment by Ben Casnocha on a venture capitaist's negative review of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Gladwell characteristically writes books that, while full of fascinating case studies, generally amount to less than the sum of their parts. Blink is one book Burton takes to task: while Gladwell admires Timothy Wilson's work, in Blink Gladwell succumbs to the temptation of suggesting we can train ourselves to make better intuitive “snap” judgments – when all we can really do is accept that our snap judgments may be right, may be wrong, and evaluate them accordingly, accepting that the final best answer we reach by these means is still not infallible. Put it that way of course, and it doesn't sound so sensational on the blurb.

Burton argues that we should raise future generations on the idea that there are biological constraints on our ability to know what we know. But perhaps our biology renders us disinclined to raise our kids this way? Is it possible that, in Paleolithic times, a false sense of certainty turned out overall to be evolutionarily adaptive?

Money and the Changing of the Seasons

Matt Borondy is calling for poems about money. This is a good excuse for me to link to Philip Larkin's “Money.” Something miraculous happens in the last stanza of that poem.

From Samuel R. Delany's On Writing --

“One way or the other, directly or indirectly, good fiction tends to be about money.”

“Whether directly or indirectly, most fiction is about the effects of having it or not having it, the tensions caused between people used to having more of it or less of it, or even, sometimes, the money it takes to write the fiction itself, if not to live it. Supremely, it's about the delusions the having it or the not having of it force us to assume in order to go on. Like Robert Graves's famous and equally true statement about poetry, however ('All true poetry is about love, death, or the changing of the seasons'), the generality ends up undercutting its interest.”

Larkin's “Money” probably is about death and the changing of the seasons... whereas Martin Amis's Money is pretty much about the effects of and tensions caused by money. Of course, Delany stresses that there's an equally important sense in which both fiction and poetry can be about anything... even so, I think there's a clue here about what the part of the brain that does fiction also does... what the part of the brain that does poetry also does...

The money poem about money Matt Borondy likes most will will an autographed copy of Katy Lederer's “The Heaven-Sent Leaf.”

Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles

This is a multi-generational saga set in a society where the institution of the family has broken down.

Janine is the daughter of a Third Republic official. She functions in the book as an anti-matriarch, an archetypal Bad Mother.

Her two sons have different fathers. The boys' relationship with each other is tenuous and casual; they seem less like brothers than rather abstracted acquaintances. Michel is a scientist, while Bruno dabbles in the humanities -- a device permitting Houellebecq economically to condemn the entire range of Western intellectual endeavor.

Neither of the half-brothers proves capable of forming a committed relationship with a woman. We get to know Annabelle well enough to feel that Michel should marry her; we get to know Christiane well enough to feel that Bruno should marry her; but both relationships end miserably... there will be no next generation of this family, who experience a hundred years of something less than solitude – complete social atomization...

Not content with condemning postwar France as a society of technocrats and hedonists, Houllebecq attempts to demonstrate novelistically that the progress of Western individualism has made any kind of social relationship impossible. His suggested solution, a future utopia reliant on cloning, will seem congenial only to followers of the Raëlian cult. What makes for the suspicion Houllebecq is a major French writer is perhaps precisely the ferocity with which he indicts his own society... for accusatory zeal at least, he is a match for Zola or Céline...

Darwin's Preference for Pretty Heroines

From Charles Darwin's autobiography --

"I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily -- against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better."

"This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

To lose a taste for Shakespeare, once acquired, is a misfortune of the same order as losing one's sense of sight or hearing. Could it really be that the carrying out of his vast scientific project caused Darwin's Shakespeare-appreciating faculties to atrophy? It's a puzzling and a frightening concept -- but as a great biologist's own intuition about the biological processes at work within himself, it can't be dismissed out of hand. Perhaps however the change in Darwin's literary appetites was more a function of increasing age than a side-effect of his scientific work?

The preference for novels with physically-and-otherwise-attractive characters and a happy ending is a common one. But tell me -- why should it make a difference how pretty the heroine of a novel is?

Linguistic Relativism and Grammatical Gender

Lera Boroditsky cites experimental evidence that the language you speak shapes how you think -- including the finding that the grammatical gender your language assigns to a noun influences your thoughts about the object in question. Boroditsky describes a beautifully-designed experiment: “when asked to describe a 'key' — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like 'hard,' 'heavy,' 'jagged,' 'metal,' 'serrated,' and 'useful,' whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say 'golden,' 'intricate,' 'little,' 'lovely,' 'shiny,' and 'tiny.' To describe a 'bridge,' which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said 'beautiful,' 'elegant,' 'fragile,' 'peaceful,' 'pretty,' and 'slender,' and the Spanish speakers said 'big,' 'dangerous,' 'long,' 'strong,' 'sturdy,' and 'towering.' This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender.”

Boroditsky adds, “Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.”

If nouns have genders in your native tongue, please let me know some adjectives you associate with death. Also, if you are unsure of your own gender, paste some of your prose into this site, and it will tell you whether you're male or female -- although it got the answer wrong in my case...

Wuthering Werewolves

My daughter asked me if Wuthering Heights is a book about vampires, understandably given the cover of the 1963 paperback edition she saw me reading, on which Cathy undeniably looks vampirish, and Heathcliff seems to be a cross between a werewolf and an albino gorilla. Emily Brontë was in fact quite open to the possibility she was writing a vampire book:

“'Is he a ghoul or a vampire?' I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy, and watched him grow to youth, and followed him almost through his whole course and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror. 'But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?' muttered Superstition, as I dozed into unconsciousness.”

Nelly Dean is the speaker here, but Brontë undoubtedly asked herself similar questions about Heathcliff as she lay shivering in bed at night. T. L. Stone pursues the vampire angle here.

Although supposed to be set early in the nineteenth century, Wuthering Heights was written during the Irish Potato Famine. This was pointed out by Terry Eagleton in arguably his greatest book, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger.

In Eagleton's plot summary, Heathcliff “is picked up starving off the streets of Liverpool by old Earnshaw. Earnshaw unwraps his greatcoat to reveal to his family a 'dirty, ragged, black-haired child' who speaks a kind of 'gibberish,' and who will later be variously labeled beast, savage, lunatic, and demon. It is clear that this little Caliban has a nature on which nurture will never stick; and that is simply an English way of saying that he is quite possibly Irish.”

“Possibly, but by no means certainly. Heathcliff may be a gypsy, or (like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) a Creole, or any kind of alien. It is hard to know how black he is, or rather how much of the blackness is pigmentation and how much of it is grime and bile.”

One disturbing thing about Heathcliff is his complete disappearance for a few years, before returning transformed, with “upright carriage” and a manner “quite divested of roughness,” not to mention a sudden facility for cards and the determination to systematically ruin all who have wronged him. If this was a fairy-tale, Heathcliff would appear to have sold his soul to the Devil – instead the explanation we're offered is the speculation that he may have been in the Army, although this seems like something it would have been easy enough for the other characters to check up on, which they never do. Recent Wuthering Heights covers may suggest vampirism, or in some cases not so much, but Heathcliff is invariably portrayed as Anglo-Saxon-looking.

Funny Stories About Unfunny Cartoons

Some anecdotes from James Thurber's The Years With Ross, a book about the early history of "The New Yorker," in the days when it was edited by Harold Ross. In 1927, a reader sent in this letter:

"I have an idea for a cartoon. The cartoon is entitled, 'Pouring over his Books.' This is a pun. Have a student sit by a desk with a stack of books before him and reading out of one book. In the meantime have him pour some gin in a glass and is ready to drink it. All about him on the floor have bottles thrown about."

"The humor in this cartoon is in the words 'pour' and 'poir,' one means to drink and the other means to study careful."

Thurber notes that in the margin of this letter, Ross wrote "Too subtle."

I especially like the following Thurber story about Ross:

"I cannot vouch for the truth of his query about a drawing of two elephants gazing at one of their offspring with the caption, 'It's about time to tell Junior the facts of life,' but, valid or apocryphal, it has passed into legend. 'Which elephant is talking?' he is supposed to have said."

Thurber has a knack for turning a joke's fragility into part of its strength. Wasn't he also one of the earliest cartoonists to discover that being not very well drawn can make a cartoon funnier?

The Feeling of Solving a Problem

I blogged earlier about those moments when plot twists emerge in the writer's mind. Lately I was prompted to rethink the nature of this process by a fascinating thought experiment in Robert Burton's On Being Certain. Burton uses the analogy of a computer that's been programmed to solve a pharmacological problem by calculating numerous solutions. The program models theoretical drugs, estimates their probable effectiveness, and displays on the computer's monitor only such solutions as are computed to have a high probability of being effective.

The monitor remains dark for months, then lights up with a formula for a new drug that's theoretically likely to work.

Burton's suggestion is that something similar is happening when a novelist abandons a novel, unable to resolve its plot, thinks about other projects for some months, then wakes up one morning with the perfect-feeling resolution rushing into consciousness. The long delay between conscious cause and conscious effect, together with the feeling of mystical certainty that can accompany revelations from our unconscious, prevents our perceiving what's happened as the slow mechanical working out of a problem: the unconscious sorting its way mechanically through endless, fruitless possibilities, and finally pushing the useful ones into awareness.

George Rabasa tells Glimmer Train, “Whenever you don't know something when you're writing, make it up. You'll be surprised how true it is when you check later.”

Burton writes, “When writing a novel, you can feel the difference between writing 'anything that comes to mind' and willful plotting where you consciously reject certain possibilities. When actively thinking, the censoring editor is in the on position; during unconscious thought it is mercifully muted. But this is only a difference of inputted information; some possibilities are consciously rejected while others are encouraged. From a neural network schema, the basic process of hidden layer processing of inputs remains the same – only the inputs have been changed by the conscious editor. Rather than opting for the dubious premise that 'unthought thoughts' represent a different 'way of thinking,' why not consider cognition as a single entity that is subdivided into various ways of being experienced?”

Note that “when you check later,” in Rabasa's phrase, you will likely do so with a strong bias towards finding what you made up is true.

Writers and Time Management

Paul Graham has an essay up here about why managers seem to like meetings whereas programmers – and writers – don't. Writing, like programming, means creating abstract contraptions that one then have to laboriously debug/ edit until they actually fly. For this purpose, one needs multiple-hour blocks of interruption-free time, a scarce commodity for the writer who has a day job and/ or kids. Which is not unrelated to why so much perfect prose was produced by people who lived in the nineteenth century and had servants.

In another essay Graham writes,“I've wondered a lot about why startups are most productive at the very beginning, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. The main reason may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet.” This essay provides a justification for my putting off cleaning my apartment in order to hack through another draft of a novel -- postponing cleaning up is actually a crucial time management tactic, one moreover at which I excel.

But for writers there can never be enough time, because ultimately there's no such thing as a “final draft” – I've never read through any supposedly-completed manuscript of mine without making some improvements, however minor. A computer program can also, in theory, be improved indefinitely, until you run into diminishing returns on your time investment, and like Achilles say, “I nearly reached the tortoise, I'll go chase another one now.”

A sentence I once heard attributed to a CEO -- “Anything that can be done can be done in two weeks.” Whereas Samuel R. Delany, in About Writing, mentions what a short time a decade is, from the point of view of a mature writer mindful of posterity...

Challenged to name a helpful idea by Stephen Covey, one of my readers cited the principle that people don't spend enough time on tasks that are important but not urgent. A writer could perhaps be defined as someone who spends too much time on tasks that are important but not urgent...