Assorted Nonsense

Alfred Hitchcock used to call people who cared too much about logic in stories the Plausibles.  He thought the Plausibles were looking for the wrong thing in his movies, that instead of looking for flawless narrative logic, they should yield to the narrative.  And it was the job of the storyteller to give the narrative sufficient momentum to compel the audience to do that.

A while back I finished reading the first Harry Potter book to my kids.  Afterwards I thought, wow, that was some really solid plotting on Rowling’s part.  In my opinion she really set up the ending nicely. 

A couple of months later I sat down and rewatched the end of the movie with the girls.  And I thought, okay wait a minute.  How did Quirrel get through the chess match?  It was completely intact when Hermione, Ron and Harry came across it.

The movie doesn’t say how, and neither (I believe) does  the book (I haven’t gone back to check yet). 

This, of course, makes me a Plausible.

But Rowling produced sufficient narrative momentum that I didn’t notice this logical gap until well after I read the book and saw the film.  And I must confess that it wasn’t until after I’d read the book for a second time, and seen the film for a third time that I gave this omission any thought (perhaps I’m not a Plausible after all).

I know that some people probably don’t care.  They assume that Voldemort must have helped Quirrel somehow, or because Quirrel was a professor he must have known some secret backdoor or the like.  But I find it interesting that Rowling doesn’t make any attempt whatsoever to cross this particular T.  (I will have to reread that portion of the book to confirm this, but the movie certainly doesn’t make any attempt.)  And this omission on her part (or the filmmaker’s part) has done nothing to dampen audience enjoyment or diminish sales.

What does this mean?  It means a few things.  It means Hitchcock was right, for one thing.  Absolute narrative logic is beside the point.  Entertainment value, suspense and narrative momentum trump narrative logic hands down.  It means storytellers don’t have to dot every i and cross every t.

It also means I’ve spent way too much time sorting out the intricacies of the labyrinthine plot of my work in progress…

… I go a spell without blogging.  Doesn’t mean I’ve given up on it.

Just, all my writing time lately has been spent on the novel.  I was on page 320, now I’m on page 315.  How the heck did that happen?  Well, I’m sorting out the conclusion.  And in the process of sorting out the conclusion I realized that about five pages worth of material back in the two hundreds were messing things up.  So I got rid of them.  Now I’m back to sorting out the conclusion.

We’re getting there.  Slowly. 

Just for fun, here is a list of the chapter names:

A Time and a Place

Part One: Beautiful Stranger

Chapter One: Demon in the Den

Chapter Two: Casa Terra

Chapter Three: A Quite Exceptional Nose

Chapter Four: Friends Like These

Chapter Five:  Ignominious Procedures

Chapter Six: Plan B

Chapter Seven: Fuzzy

Part Two: Through the Looking Glass

Chapter Eight:  A Short Trek

Chapter Nine: Inside

Chapter Ten: Cat

Chapter Eleven:  Vegetation Abounded

Part Three: What’s Past is Prologue

Chapter Twelve:  She That Dwells

Chapter Thirteen: Monkey Business

Part Four: No Time Like the Present

Chapter Fourteen: Wings

Chapter Fifteen: Ansalar

Chapter Sixteen:  Scary Monsters

Chapter Seventeen: Interview With a Monster

Chapter Eighteen:  No Place Like Home Part One

Chapter Nineteen: No Place Like Home Part Two

Chapter Twenty: Still picking out a name for this one

Epilogue

I’m working on Chapter Nineteen through to the Epilogue right now. 

All I can say is I understand what George R. R. Martin must be going through right now…

Here’s more on Avatar, in response to this blog post, which I really think is over thinking the matter.

So now I’ll just go ahead and over think it:

Cameron’s hero is white because he’s white.  If he were to make a
movie with a hero of a different skin colour he would probably find
himself subject to even greater criticism, so he’s pretty much gotta
stick to white.

So he makes a movie about his white hero interacting with aliens.  He
could make the aliens white, but then they’d be the same as his hero.
It would be a completely white movie.  What kind of criticism would he
be subject to then?  So he doesn’t make them white, he makes them a
different colour, blue.  Why blue?  Because his mother dreamt about a
nine foot tall blue alien when he was a kid, which he thought was cool
and always remembered.

Now he’s got three choices.  Either the aliens are more advanced than
his hero, or the same technological level, or more primitive.  If he
made them more advanced there would be no comparisons to Dances With
Wolves and probably a whole let less criticism.  Maybe he should have
done that.  Better yet, had he made the natives the same technological
level as the hero it would have been a fair fight at the end and he
also would have avoided comparisons to Dances With Wolves.  Probably
he should have done that. Except that environmentalism is all the rage
now and it fit the plot he had in mind so he made the mistake of
making the aliens noble savages, and the comparisons to First Nations
folk becomes inevitable.

So what is the criticism in that post exactly?  That this movie is a
product of guilt, that it’s a white guy trying to make up for the
crimes of his own race by creating a hero who saves another race from
his own.  And that the movie is also a product of wish fulfillment,
because while he’s at it the hero (with whom the filmmaker and
audience both identify) gets to be just that, a hero, and the coolest
member of the other race.

On the first point, Cameron himself isn’t responsible for the white
invasion of the Americas. So I think it’s quite an assumption that he
would feel any guilt on that matter.  Why should he?  He didn’t have
anything to do with it.  He probably does (and should) deplore any
atrocities associated with said invasion, but I don’t see how any
residual racial guilt would necessarily find its way into any of his
films.  That being said I suppose it’s entirely possible that his
great grandfather was General George Armstrong Custer, in which case I stand corrected, but I doubt it.

On the second point I expect Cameron is guilty as charged.  It’s
completely wish fulfillment.  But what’s wrong with that?  What’s
wrong with fantasizing about being the hero, and getting to fly on the
backs of cool huge birds, and being able to fight like a son of a gun?
 Even if it is fantasizing about being a hero among a race other than
your own?  Maybe it’s just about being accepted, accepted by people
you happen to think are cool, and no more than that, certainly not
about being accepted by people a whole bunch of other people (who have
no more in common with you other than your skin colour) once treated
(exceedingly) poorly.

The more I think about it the more I realize that Cameron’s one true
mistake was making his aliens blue.  If he had made them white it
would have been exactly the same movie, but nobody would have been
able to read more into it than is actually there (although I expect
they still would have).  In real life we strive to be colour blind,
because we know that skin colour doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter.  I
would suggest that the same should apply to this film.  It seems to me
Cameron is being picked on because of the colour of his skin.

Sometimes an alien is just an alien.

Somebody on a listserve I’m on trashed Avatar recently.  Having just stated on the same listserve that I liked the movie, I felt compelled to respond.  I can’t post the post I was responding to, but it should be pretty clear the sorts of things they were saying in my response:

Hi **********,

***********Spoiler alert**********

As someone who enjoyed the film I feel compelled to respond.

Cameron is the first to admit that the story is a hodge-podge of all his favourite science fiction tropes gleaned since childhood.  I don’t see how this is a bad thing as long as it’s not plagiarism, and the original sources are not denied; we all stand on the shoulders of giants.  No less a misanthrope than Harlan Ellison has stated that he would have been fine with Cameron “stealing” his ideas if only he had been credited (for Terminator).

Yes, the natives are Noble Savages but again I don’t see why that in itself is bad.  We’re not allowed to create stories about primitive cultures, or allegedly advanced cultures encountering those primitive cultures?

Your main criticism (if I’ve interpreted it correctly) seems to be
that the so-called primitive (non white, somewhat matriarchal) society needed to be saved by a member of a so-called advanced (white, male) society.  However, in the film it doesn’t appear he taught them much.  He certainly taught them little or nothing about fighting.  For one thing he didn’t have much time to.  He simply led them, brought them together to fight, inspired by the example of a previous generation of natives (as opposed to some innate “white” wisdom he himself brought to the table).  And ultimately when his attempt to thwart the enemy
failed, it was Pandora itself that responded, achieving success with its own methods, spurred into action by the memories and knowledge of a woman (admittedly white).

I would submit that the white man learned far more from this primitive culture (and the example of least two female mentors and role models) than he taught them.  Specifically, environmentalism and how to utilize (as opposed to exploit) your environment.  In return, the only thing he really taught them was the reality of the threat that they faced, which (through no fault of their own) they were ill-equipped to
appreciate.  And why shouldn’t he be allowed to teach them that if that was what they needed to learn, and it was all he had to offer in return for the riches with which they endowed him?

Finally, when the hero faced the American military leader in the end, the larger battle had already been won, by Pandora.  He was not therefore fighting on behalf of the natives at this point.  The final confrontation was about saving his own life.  And he didn’t even win that fight; he needed to be saved by a native (a woman, no less).

I would like to hear your unabridged thoughts on this movie’s
treatment of heterosexism, anthropomorphism, gender politics, Real Men and the fight between military (male) and cultural sensitivity etc. to understand exactly what else about this (in my opinion) really quite enjoyable movie got under your skin.

Regards,

Joe

I read an interview with Stephen R. Donaldson the other day (author of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles, the Axebrewder mysteries, the Gap saga, and others).  In it he stated what an excruciatingly slow writer he is.

And instantly I felt a lot better about myself.

I felt even better when he expressed one of the reasons why he’s a slow writer.  He said its because he never comes right out and expresses the emotions of his characters.  This is one of the reason’s why I’m a slow writer, too (sadly, the comparisons probably end there).

Not expressing emotions directly means you have to find other means of indicating the emotions of your characters.  So easy just to say, Ridley came home all happy.  Much more difficult to express that sentiment in some other subtle fashion, in a way that makes the reader complicit in the story.   “Ridley fairly capered up the front steps of the house,”  maybe.

Why do this?  To immerse the reader that much more fully in the story.  If you tell the reader too much, if you don’t leave a little bit for them to figure out, they don’t get as involved in the story.  You want to make them think.  You want to raise questions that compell them to read further to get those questions answered.

Why is Ridley capering up those steps?   Does that mean he’s happy?  You don’t caper if you’re angry.  Do you?  I’d better read a bit further to see why he’s capering, to see if I’m right.

Once you get the reader thinking like that, they’re hooked.  I hope.  At least that’s what I’m counting on.

Also, honestly, it’s probably a bit of a game with me.  I can’t come right out and state things like that explicitly, even if I want to.  I will, sometimes, in early drafts.  But I always change it.  It’s my rule.  Never come right out and state what the characters are feeling.  Show what they’re feeling instead.

The downside, of course, is that it takes me a long time to finish writing a novel.

Here’s hoping it’s worth it.

When I was but a young lad my father used to play an 8 Track (yes, an 8 Track!) of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers called Live at Carnegie Hall.

I always remembered that 8 Track (yes!  An 8 Track!) and when I growed up (sic) into the strapping man I was briefly in my twenties I would think of it fondly.  Later,  in my couch potato thirties, I thought of it some more, but did nothing about it.

(I might be confused.  It might be Simon and Garfunkle that was on 8 Track, and Live at Carnegie Hall on vinyl.  Damn this aging memory.  No matter.)

But it wasn’t until my forties that I got around to purchasing Live at Carnegie Hall on CD.  I thought it was just a nostalgia purchase, a way to recapture a hint of my youth.  Once purchased, though,  I found myself listening to it all the time.  It is a beautiful performance, full of lively music, funny music, touching music.

That album wasn’t all I knew of them.  My father had other albums too.  I used to take them to CJRW Radio with me back when I was a DJ.  I did a six hour country show on Friday Nights called the Ranch Party, and I would often slip in some Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers.  I remember I used to play this one song I really liked called Isn’t it Grand, Boys.  I don’t remember much of it now, except that one line went: “Isn’t it grand boys, to be bloody well dead.”

One night after playing that song a regular listener called up to say that I should never play that song again.  It wasn’t that they didn’t like the song, it was that they couldn’t handle the sentiment.  They were of an age where perhaps they had seen too much of death, or perhaps they felt their’s was imminent, and they had yet to come to terms with it (who has?).  Out of respect for this regular listener’s feelings it was with some regret that I never did play that song again.

The last of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers passed away the other day, Liam Clancy.  He may think it’s grand, but I don’t.  Thankfully his music and that of his colleagues live on because we live in an age where though artists may pass on, their work doesn’t (necessarily).  Just today I listened to Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers version of The Parting Glass from their performance Live at Carnegie Hall.

Good night, Mr. Clancy and friends, and joy be with you all.

Daniel Yaari (pictured above with a Neve console) is visiting CBC Radio from Israel to help us perfect some DaletPlus software.  But although Daniel works for Dalet these days, he’s really a recording engineer.

He sent me this picture today which I thought was kind of cool.  The console he’s standing behind is a Neve, which is one of the finest names in recording consoles.  I had the pleasure of flying a Neve Capricorn for several years in studio 212, the radio drama facility, at CBC Radio.  It was a fine sounding console, if a tad flaky paired with a Sonic Solutions digital editing system.

But the really cool thing about the console pictured above is that before Daniel’s studio in Israel got their hands it it belonged to The Record Plant.  Apparently tracks for John Lennon’s Imagine and David Bowie’s Let’s Dance (among many others) were recorded on it.

Take a look at the small set of speakers Daniel’s leaning on.  Those are Auratones.  We also have a set in studio 212.  I was giving Daniel and his family a tour of our facilities and when he saw the Auratones he laughed.  “Always have to check your mixes through Auratones!” he said, and he’s right, we frequently checked our mixes on the little Auratones to see what they sounded like on something a little closer to the kind of stereo people had at home.

One of Daniel’s favourite tricks was to dub his mixes to cassette and listen to them in his car.  I used to do exactly the same thing (only on CD) because there’s no better way to tell what your mix sounds like in a crummy listening environment than listening to them in your car.  I remember subjecting my sister Shawna to a night of driving around listening to an episode of the radio play Steve the Second in my Sienna.

Ah the good ol’ days…

Just for fun, and because I keep mentioning it, here’s a snippet of “A Time and a Place”.  I read this bit to a bunch of friends recently and the resultant scorn and derision was well within acceptable limits.  I don’t think posting this tiny little section is giving too much away.

The section starts at page one hundred and sixty-three of the novel, at the beginning of Chapter Eleven, a chapter entitled Vegetation Abounded:

It was awful – the light too bright and the sounds too loud.  I cried out and curled up into a ball to protect myself.

“Wildebear!  Can you hear me?  What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s not used to it.”

“Will he be all right?”

“He should.”

“Should?”

“He might not.”

“Will he or won’t he?”

“That’s what you’re here for, doctor.  To see that he’s okay.”

“Hmph.  What happened to him?”

“Not much.  Plenty.”

“That’s an infuriating thing to say.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry – just don’t say anything like that ever again.”

“I can’t promise that I’ll –”

“Okay okay, just — where was he, anyway?”

“Where he needed to be.”

“Oh for crying out – Wildebear!  Wildebear, it’s me, Humphrey.”

I peeked out from between my arms to see who was talking.  Humphrey – the name sounded familiar.  He had a lot of meat on him, this Humphrey.  He’d make a sumptuous meal.  And I just happened to be starving.  Although a part of me knew that there was something very wrong with the idea, I unfurled myself in anticipation of a feast.  Catching a glimpse of one of my front paws, I was shocked to discover that it was almost completely hairless.  My God!  Was I ill?  I emitted a most un-T’Klee like whimper and curled back up.

“Physiologically he’s all over the map,” a voice said.  “His pulse is racing and his serotonin levels are dangerously low.”

It had come from my front foreleg.  Something shiny and silver was attached to me.  I tried to lick it off.

The creature Humphrey leaned down to touch me.  Instantly I whirled on it, but something was the matter with my reflexes.  Before I could deliver the coup de grace the Humphrey creature grabbed hold of me and held fast.  I found myself in the embarrassing position of having been captured by my own prey.  It was like having been bested by a bandaloot.  I hoped that none of my brothers were around to see.

Except that… I had no brothers.  It was Cat’s brothers I was thinking of.

And I was not Cat.

Was I?

“Damn it Wildebear, what were you trying to do?  Slit my throat?”

Humphrey.  Humphrey!  It was my old friend Doctor Peter Humphrey – and I had been about to eat him!  What had I been thinking?  Awfully confused, flitting back and forth between two identities, one human, the other a cat, I could not have said with any degree of certainty who or what I was just then.

“You should think about cutting your nails once in a while,” Humphrey muttered.

A thin red line had emerged on the side of Humphrey’s neck.  My attempt to dispatch him had come altogether too close for comfort. I started to apologize, but couldn’t seem to get the words out — talking involved using whiskers I no longer possessed.

Humphrey let go and stepped back.  I desperately tried to pull myself together.  I had no fur, no whiskers; I was, therefore, not a cat.  I was a human.  And humans spoke with their –

“Humphrey!  I – I’m so sorry.  It’s – it’s good to see you alive!”

He touched a finger to his neck.  The tip came away red.  “Little thanks to you.”

I rose to my feet and took in my surroundings.  We were in a small room blanketed in luxurious sheets and pillows.  Frills, tassels, reds and purples abounded.  The furnishings would not have been out of place in a Sultan’s tent… or that of a T’Klee.  Humphrey and I were not the only ones in the room, I saw.  Iugurtha was there as well.

I began backing away slowly.

“You’re scaring him,” Humphrey told her.

“It’s not me he should be afraid of,” she said.

And with that everything fell into place.  Suddenly I knew precisely who I was, where I was, and what I had just been through.  It seemed incredible, but I had just spent several days, possibly weeks, living inside the mind of an alien cat.  I had witnessed the subjugation of a people I had come to love by a race of horrible monsters.  After an experience like that it was a wonder I was anything resembling sane.

“Wildebear.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“You’re licking the backs of your hands.”

“Ah.”  I stopped and considered.  “So I am.”  Then, because there really was no better way to relieve stress, I resumed licking in earnest.  “Please don’t ever throw me through the gate again,” I told Iugurtha in between licks.

“Once should suffice,” she said.  “What is your opinion, Doctor?  Is he in good health?”

“Nothing a little bed rest and years of psychotherapy won’t fix,” Humphrey replied.

Mention of rest made me realize how exhausted I was.  I excused myself, curled atop several of the fluffiest pillows I could find, and purred myself to sleep in a matter of seconds.

Thinking about my process today.

Which is so frigging slow.

I write in the morning on the GO Train, maybe half an hour if I’m lucky.

I write in the evening on the GO Train, maybe half an hour if I’m lucky.

Every now and then I’ll write in the evening at home, anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half.

I write when I take my kids to a lesson, anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.

There are a few other places where I’ll squeeze in some writing if I get a chance.  If I’m home sick, or waiting for an appointment, or on a day off when my kids are in school and my wife’s working, or on those rare, blessed occasions when I’ve deliberately set aside an entire day to write in a cafe (those days are few and far between).

So I generally don’t get a whole lot of writing done in a single sitting.

Which is why I’ve been working on my current novel in earnest from the Fall of 2005 and it isn’t finished yet.  Damn close, mind you, page 316 of 345 of the final draft.

But man it’s frustrating.  I feel like I’m doing claymation, not fiction writing.  Because the pace I write at I feel like I’m completing maybe thirty, forty seconds worth of work a day.  Two or three minutes a week if I’m lucky.  And that’s being generous.   What I mean by that is that on a good day I might complete a paragraph that would take mere seconds to read.  In a week, maybe three or four pages that would take a couple of minutes to read.

When Nick Park was first working on the claymation classic Wallace and Gromit in his basement he considered himself lucky to complete three or four seconds of material a day.  At that rate he’d probably still be working on the first Wallace and Gromit A Grand Day Out had not Aardman Animations helped him finish it.

Of course the reason I work at this pace is because I have a demanding full time job and a young family.  Sometimes I think, man, what I wouldn’t give to be able to write full time.  Then I think, well I wouldn’t give my family, that’s for sure.  Nor would I give my day job, which I enjoy, and which puts bread on the table.  So I will continue to work at this pace for some time.

The good news is this time last year I was on page 245-250.  So I completed about sixty-five final draft pages in a year.  With about thirty pages left to go, I should (knock wood) be done A Time and a Place in about half a year, if all goes well.

And in another ten or twelve years I’ll retire from the day job and THEN get to write full time.  By then, at the rate I’m going, I should have two completed novels under my belt.

Joe the eternal optimist…

Heard a lot of Rex Murphy today, first on Fresh Air, then on his own show, Cross Country Check Up.

Made me think of the first time I met the man.

I’d just returned from living in France, so I’d been out of the CBC Radio loop for awhile.  One of my first bookings upon returning was recording a little voicer from someone I assumed was a freelancer.

I met the gentleman in the studio and he handed me his script.  I helped him get comfortable in the booth, asking him if he knew how to turn his mic off and on and whether he knew how to adjust the volume of his headphones.  I did this because I’d learned that many freelancers and guests come from backgrounds far removed from radio and any little thing you can do to help them get comfortable in a radio environment helps their performance.  This particular freelancer did not let on that I might be telling him stuff he already knew.

He did one and only one pass on the script, which was a commentary the subject matter of which I’ve long since forgotten.  I do remember that I had two issues with the freelancer’s performance.  One was a slight vocal stumble at one point, and the other was a word choice that I questioned.

When the freelancer came out of the booth I mentioned both issues.  I did so because when you’re working with mere mortals, and even when you’re not, everyone involved in the process usually wants to get things right, it’s just a part of the job to point out mistakes so that they might be corrected.

Instead of responding to my constructive criticism the freelancer thanked me for recording him and left the studio.  I remember thinking, well that was interesting.

It wasn’t too long afterward that I discovered the freelancer wasn’t a freelancer at all but a well established broadcasting personality in Newfoundland on the cusp of becoming a well established broadcasting personality nationally.  I don’t think he intended to be rude by ignoring my attempt to improve his performance in the studio.  I expect his confidence in his performance by that point in his career was such that he knew it was fine and that I was just being picky.   I can’t remember what word choice I had taken an exception to but knowing what I know about the man now I’m fairly certain that whatever it was he was right and I was wrong.  He was probably just bemused by my attempt to correct him.

I’m letting him off a bit easy.  He should have at least acknowledged my remarks before leaving the studio.  There was perhaps a little bit of the CBC “class” system at play, in which he was the talent and I the mere technician.

But I’ve met the man a few times since then and (although he never remembers me from encounter to encounter, there’s really no reason why he would) he’s always unfailingly polite and as far as I know a nice guy.  Plus I have developed enormous respect for him as a talent.   I love his commentaries and I appreciate his stance on most subjects (his remarks this morning on Fresh Air concerning the science and politics of Global Warming were spot on).  The sheer breadth of his vocabulary and the skill with which he wields his weapon of choice — words — commands my respect.

I can’t remember who wrote it, but the best line I’ve ever read about Rex Murphy was a blurb on the cover of one of his collection of essays.  Paraphrasing here, but it went something like:

“When Rex Murphy dies, they’re going to have to beat his mouth to death with a stick.”

Love that line, love Rex Murphy, a true Canadian institution.

Even if he did ignore my criticism.