Therefore ?

Maybe there’s a limited amount of time I’m willing to spend on indignation. Maybe there’s a saturation point beyond which indignation simply doesn’t get the job done. I’m thinking here of a petition I didn’t sign yesterday, despite the fact I agree with Amnesty International’s defense of privacy in the face of massive governmental intrusions on citizens’ basic rights.

I may still sign the petition but it feels useless to me. A “Sir, I exist!” type response. Something like a passenger in a runaway train, for instance, circulating a petition onboard, denouncing the company’s maintenance policy.

I don’t think honorable or dishonorable leaders thus addressed give a sweet goddamn about petitions. I don’t think they even consider useless the exercise of having Big Daddy spying on every click of computer keys or every phone conversation streaming through Big Daddy’s spyware. How much of the stuff gets “analyzed” as they say? How much of it yields anything worth pursuing. How much of the spying has made the world a safer place for you, me, my friendly neighbor and my stupid one? Drones,  guns, tanks, explosives: manufactured by whom? Sold to whom? Surely, the list is smaller than the number of folks who use computers, phones and other electronic equipment. But -ah. How could we have a war on terror without weapons? Ah. And how would we keep the good folks employed without the war industries and their attendant spying? Ah.

Meanwhile, whether cowed or indignant, most so-called citizens go about their business. Some get blown up (their bad for being where they were while Big Daddy collected useless data), or get stuck in “retention centers” for making the mistake of believing their chances would improve once they’d gotten across the border. Others couldn’t care less, yet others wring their hands, or see their therapist, or…

Therefore?

Therefore, as much as I can, I concentrate on keeping up the pretense I’m channelling Buster Keaton. The man did all his own stunts, too. (I do a slow-mo version, minus the runaway train. Something like a juggler handling eleven pins, minus the pins. My version involves filling endless forms, not breaking a leg on rutted sidewalks and not collapsing of heart failure after puffing up and down endless flights of stairs. I make myself laugh, every chance I get).

Current reading: I finished Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale last night. Wherein, by story’s end,  one person comes back from the dead and the good woman who lost her husband gets another one for her troubles. Fairy tales will come true, it could happen to you. Yes, I am being facetious. I would have loved to see the play as staged by Peter Brook.

Cash and Carry

These are hard times for the reasonably honest among us. I write “reasonably” because excess in anything is suspicious. And suspicion is the main topic these days. For instance, I read this morning that the next target for governmental scrutiny will be cash payments. (How about implanting a “cookie” in each coin that will trace the coin’s journey and provide the fingerprints of those who exchanged it?)

Part of the general mood : A cartoon shows several sheep staring at an election poster of a wolf with a swastika armband. One sheep says to another: “I think I’ll vote for the wolf. It will give the shepherd something to think about.” Perhaps this will bring a few people to vote at Sunday’s departmental elections. But the problem runs much deeper than who will manage to bring out the most voters. As in many other countries, we read every day about astounding levels of fraud, graft and corruption from elected officials of all persuasions. To such an extent that I hear weary comments such as: “They can’t do worse.” I suspect they can, and if elected, they will. My suspicions don’t make a whit of difference. I’m not a French citizen. I pay taxes, that I do, but I can’t vote.

Part of the problem is the blank check voting provides to whomever wins an election. For a period running anywhere between five and seven years, the elected one deals with other elected ones, except at hand-shaking and photo op occasions. The logic that prevails at council meetings or international conferences has nothing to do with the world as seen from a plain citizen’s perspective. Us plain citizens don’t understand, this is a given. Elected officials must deal with the real world  we plain citizens know nothing about. This is one of the basic arguments that lead to greater, better, deeper surveillance on plain citizens. Why? Because notwithstanding Pierre Desproges famous witticism, the enemy may well be hiding in the geranium instead of standing at our door. Or so it would seem once you enter  the murky world of suspicion where a geranium by any name whatsoever is not to be trusted.

***

For a change of pace from all the murky doomsday scenarios playing out there: a moment with the dog – my written equivalent to a cute-doggie moment on Facebook? So be it. At any rate, I listened to voice by voice replays of the Russian song sopkah manchuri last night -yet  another song claiming that these brothers in arm shall live on forever and never be forgotten. The music is the thing though, because my dog’s vocabulary does not extend to Russian, especially of the garbled kind. But the melodic line? Transports her to a state of being in which she attempts to crawl into my armpit, licks my hands, lays her head on my lap, and carries on like this for as long as the music lasts. After which she collapses to the floor and sleeps with snores and yelps suggestive of attempts to repeat the experience out in dreamland.

Current reading: I’m still in The Winter’s Tale. The structure of the tale like a triptych. The tale itself owing so much to the characters found in fairy tales.

Story Material and Scene Prep as categories for this blogpost because everything seems to serve as such at the moment.

Enter Time, as Chorus

I’m only at Act 2 Scene 3*. However, I love line 745 in Act 4 Scene 4 when Autolycus says: “Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.” Can anyone improve on such a line? Praise be to William Shakespeare.

I’m a bit distracted this morning.

“If you want something badly enough and you believe in it hard enough, you will eventually get it: though tragedy denies this possibility, comedy affirms it.” (From the Introduction to the play).

“An old wives’ or a winter’s tale is like a fairy story: it is not supposed to be realistic and it is bound to have a happy ending. Along the way, there will be magic, dreams, coincidences, children lost and found.” (Also from the Introduction).

Distracted because my thoughts keep turning to something I finished writing some fifteen years ago. Because of the figure of an old crone? Perhaps. Can the ending to that series of tales be called happy? Yes, if you see the tales from her perspective. Same as for Jane Campion’s The Piano, for instance.

What bearing does any of this have on the current work in progress? I don’t have a clue.

* But is it “The”  or “A Winter’s Tale”? My RSC edition says “The”. Everybody else, including Peter Brook, seems to call it “A”.

Allez? Allez.

The crowd last night at Bêtes de Foire included most of the people who worked on the show – puppeteers, musicians, constructors of automatons. Crowd being a relative concept. The tent accommodates a maximum of one hundred and thirty people. There will be a fourth showing on Friday in a neighboring village. I doubt I can make it. If I can, I’ll learn even more about the minute precision of the performances, and the stage management of unexpected glitches and sudden inspirations.

While standing in line, I learned that another group of circus artists had lost their big (all right, medium) top to the vandals who destroyed personal property out at Sivens. Slashed their tent to shreds, and good luck with the insurance company. I also learned that the snippets of poems I receive on the screen of my phone aren’t general mailings. “Why don’t you answer my messages,” the clown asked me. “I thought they were general broadcasts,” I answered. This won’t make answering them any easier. I like the person who plays the clown. He has a great wish to see peace on earth and goodwill towards all become the basis of everyone’s political platform. Who can disagree, save for the details of how, when and where to implement to everyone’s satisfaction.

As I write, a message comes in on same phone concerning legal representation for a family in dire need of same. The toughest part in writing fiction: when the “real” world and the fictional one balance out too evenly. Homeostasis, it’s called. Provokes the need to break the balance, even when I’m in full agreement with my friend the clown’s agenda – or, at least, with the sentiment he’s expressing.

Querying? Yes, must keep up with that part of the program. Promises you make to yourself matter. A lot. Even if you have to sort through and do regular updates on them. In the left corner, still crazy after all these years: A fine selection of promises. In the right corner, getting crazier by the minute: real life in full ramification.

As I walked down the rutted sidewalk  yesterday, I noticed the largest potholes in the street had received a sprinkling of asphalt. First round of the departmental elections on Sunday. I had to laugh inwardly at the notion I address my queries and – for the most part, the remarks I post here – to places far, far away where people live their own lives filled with events, big and small, about which I know nothing. A local someone told me she had attempted a read of this blog, but her English wasn’t up to speed. Voilà.

Allez, as the title says, the day beckons.

The traveling preacher

Printed newspapers don’t belong to my usual reading, although I leaf through them when they’re available in waiting rooms. One held my attention yesterday for three reasons: the utter inanity of a piece of hand-wringing published under the title of Editorial, plus two photographs given almost equivalent visual treatment. One of them on a two-page spread involving the current incarnation of something I struggle to put into proper words. Since I make a point of avoiding videos designed to celebrate their crimes, I can’t say if the man is or  is not connected to hate murders committed in France against military personnel and children and workers in a Jewish school. Whoever he may be, he’s made the grade in terms of news coverage. I was struck by the utter banality of his features.

Struck even more by the fact the newspaper chose to position with equal prominence a young man on trial for his participation in a demonstration. The photo shows him with fabric over his face and his clown nose well in evidence. His accusers – four policemen – swear he threw stones at them. The young man swears he did no such thing. He is a clown activist – one of several who show up at tense encounters between civilians and police, and attempt to turn down the heat through parody. Unfortunately, authorities don’t have much of a sense of humor. Even sadder, desk editors at some papers play along with the Fear and Trembling themes in the current headlines.

One among several reasons for writing fiction? The opportunity to re-visit those moments when anger, fear, horror or indignation wiped out everything other than the herding instinct. To re-visit and find there  some of the other elements that were in the mix and went unnoticed.

For story purposes, one of the things that strike me in the “after-Charlie”, pre-electoral mood here: the justifications given to anything-goes verbal attacks against any and every individual or minority the attacker chooses to scapegoat. . Those who feel the need to defend their right to slander, threaten and humiliate say: the cartoonists who were killed at Charlie Hebdo made fun of everything and everyone. Therefore, I’m allowed to do the same. As if your next door neighbor and a pencilled rendition of a symbol or concept were interchangeable. Someone drew the Pope with lifted skirts? Hurray, that means I can pour vile qualifiers on… take your pick. Of course, some attackers don’t bother with justifications. Their cause is just and the Infidel – whomever he or she may be – must disappear.

A few lines in Robertson Davies’ The Manticore, relative to this topic. Someone saying to another: “You are a fanatic. Don’t you know what fanaticism is? It’s an overcompensation for doubt.” And this, for the young man with the opaque eyes and the unremarkable features : “It was the look of one who has laid himself open to a force that is inimical to man, and whose power to loose that force upon the world was limited only by his imagination, his opportunities, and his daring.” Daring being the lowest member on the totem pole.

All of this as prep for aspects of a story I’ve been attempting to write for some time. A slow process, much slower than the latest batch of breaking news, whatever it may be.

Freakish

Maybe what frightens people away from writing – or any other sustained endeavor requiring a commitment to regular practice – are those bouts of bone-crushing loneliness when the work isn’t going well. Or when an off-hand remark out of nowhere feels like the thumb of God resting on the top of your head. “A writer, are you? So where are the books?” Or: if nobody wants your stories (implied: if they’re not good enough for the professionals), why don’t you self-publish? Or: Self-publication is the only way to go. Those fat publishers and book sellers don’t deserve to make  one centime off your sweat (this from the Anarchy Forever ones who will never read a word of mine anyway, since I’m willing to solicit the attentions of arrogant literary agents who are nothing but the running lackeys of… etc).

Plus, the scary ones who say: “I’d love to read what you write.” And the panic sets in: oh my gods,  please spare me well-intentioned criticism. Please, please. Etc.

Of course, once you’re into the writing, there’s no bone-crushing anything. You’re in it, the same way a swimmer is in swimming by the thirty-fourth or fiftieth lap. The whole problem, to use that example: getting to the pool in the first place, and into the chlorinated water and off through the first laps filled with faulty breathing, poor coordination, and all the garbage churning through the synapses.

A young girl (ten? eleven) delivering a parcel to my mobile home in Florida, once. Stepping inside and opening wide, frightened eyes. She looked around. “This is so… freaky,” she said.

I looked around, searching for the source of the freakiness. “What’s bothering you, Heather?”

The answer took a while to surface. “The… quiet,” she said.

As in: no tv sets competing for attention – in fact, no tv set at all. No music. No screaming over the rest of the racket. The quiet. Hearing the natural sounds around her. Lord help us- listening in to her own thoughts. How freaky can it get.

The toughest are the bone-crushing bouts of loneliness, but even those are all right, once you manage to make something out of them.

One thing I know: you don’t put on supremely accomplished juggling and acrobatics like those I saw this weekend at  Elsa de Witte and Laurent Cabrol’s Bêtes de Foire* without spending a lot, a lot of alone time with just you, gravity, and objects in need of re-enchantment.

* The title refers, in French, to the so-called Freak Sideshows that once flourished at country fairs. These days you can find freak shows on TV, I guess. (You’re sounding snobbish, the voice says in my head. Oh, Heather, you were right. Silence can be freaky.)

 

Another Sunday

All right. After a brief tour of various news and opinion sources, back to here. Topping the slanted pile on my right: faded photocopies of a storyboard done by someone who abandoned her project a few years back. The story as such doesn’t interest me but some of the drawings fit the mood for one of the children in a messy, messy draft. These few years later, the copies are so faded, I must run over the lines with a sanguine pencil.

A problem, combining query work on one story while feeling the pull back to another. Attention wavers. Too many signals.

***

Two excellent moments away from the messy, messy desk yesterday. The first, on my way to grocery shopping, to a friend’s new studio and shop. A long pause in the typing, here. Something like the pause in front of a photo he had just printed out on a huge device that uses inks guaranteed against fading for one hundred years.  On paper suitable for that kind of work. He offered me another photo on long-term loan because it inspired as “my” book cover for Hautvoir stories. “My” book covers being amateurish mock-ups I pull together for my own benefit in the world of as-if.

The second moment, inside a small circus tent with an even smaller ring. Seating capacity: one hundred and thirty. Two principals, one dog, and a cast of automatons. Juggling and mime of the highest order. This afternoon, I’m going back to see Laurent, Elsa and Sokha again in Bêtes de Foire. From a seat on the other side of the tent.

***

Plus culling, culling and more culling through things accumulated inside this apartment.

Yardsticks

If seeing any of your writing in print means anything to you, this is a must-read. Why? Because it’s honest, it’s funny, it’s daunting and it catches the flavor of a specific microcosm. For me, the  reading is made even funnier by the total disconnect between the deal-making world in New York and the present realities in my life – most of which I cannot discuss here, and some of which I attempt to re-cast in fictional terms.

I’m spending long stretches of my time in reviewing agency websites at the moment. Alert to an elusive something that might signal a path through the hype, the glitz and the plain old misrepresentations; and also, much as in Goldilocks, a sense of the right size container for the stories I write.

Success – by whose yardstick. From a publisher’s viewpoint: the biggest possible return on his or her investment. From a good agent who cares about the work and about his or her own reputation: best possible client list and satisfactory deals struck. For the writer? Depends on the writer, of course. For this writer? Finding the right audience. Which begins with finding the right agent once I’ve done everything I can with the story and its unavoidable synopsis.

One of the agents I’ve tagged for a query likes to receive the one-page version of a synopsis. Something like building a model of the ship inside a tiny bottle. An interesting challenge, if only as a voyage of discovery into what it was you truly wrote and what truly matters in that writing. I’ll give it a try.

It may sound silly but, in many instances, the very glossiness and perfection of the artwork and promotional copy on display puts me ill at ease. What? I want a grungy-looking  book and spelling mistakes in the blurb? No, I want a book cover that looks something like the content. There’s nothing slick about the world in which I live and write. Not much expectation of making the list of Biggest, Most Outstanding, Most Awesome Ten Best Ever anything. Most of the characters in my stories are like the people I encounter every day: they know the odds are against them, they know the game is rigged. They laugh anyway because laughter is something way more precious than their rating in a rigged game. The day may come when there’s a tax applied to laughter – heck, at this point, some people are getting jail terms or lashings for playing the Fool – a role even kings understood as crucial to their social order.

So. Off goes Ravel’s Le Petit Poucet through a forest of high rises springing up around him. The pigeons ate the crumbs, the street cleaner swept away the pebbles. Allez? Allez.

Agents and unsolicited manuscripts: their expectations and mine

One of the agency websites I visited yesterday peeled off a long list of clients aka writers. Of course, you were welcome to click on any one of the names and get a better sense of what this writer wrote. A daunting prospect when not a single of the names is familiar and you get the feeling of a visit to a big box store. To which you add the obvious question: do I wish to find an available niche  in this agency’s names beginning with a B? On to the next website, although I’ll go back for a glance at a few of the writers listed there, if only as a courtesy to their status as writers.

My reading of any number of contemporary writers is non-existent – be they prize winners or not, the quirky principle of attraction works or it doesn’t. I read precious little of the current writers published in French. Perhaps this will change. In the meantime, I’m not about to lash myself with a wet noodle, any more than I would over my non-interest in tackling Murakami’s IQ84 in any translation whatsoever. Life is short. The books I hope to read outnumber the ones I’ve read already. The stories I’ve written still need to find a home. The ones I haven’t written yet still hover in the place where the unborn await the shove into the arena, there to grow as fast as they can and make some sense of the world around them.

What matters. Finding someone who likes what I do, who has a sense of who else in the publishing world might like it too, who points out the flaws and the pitfalls and respects both my right to angst and my right to decide if I re-write or don’t. Finding my personal version of Staunton’s Dr Von Haller in Robertson Davies’ The Manticore when she explains her role: “Oh, I am several things; an interested spectator, for one and for another, I shall be a figure that appears only in military courts, called Prisoner’s Friend. And I shall be an authority on precedents, and germane judgements, and I shall keep both the prosecutor and the defence counsel in check. I shall be custodian of that constant and perpetual wish to render to everyone his due.”

In the meantime, I’d best get on with earning my keep.

Past, Present, Future

The boy broke down in tears a few seconds after I took his picture. Too hard, he said. He’d never understand. Why was I scolding him all the time. He’d never make it. Etc.

The fact is, the boy has huge challenges. Not least of which his buying into the underachiever mind set of his father (whose struggles with alcohol started at age nine), and the forever-overwhelmed vibe put out by his mother. When I suggested she take five minutes of her time to review with her son the present tense of the verbs to be and to have, she looked close to a major melt-down. In fact, I felt like a spokesperson for the Inquisition, outlining the schedule of her tour in the torture chamber.

I’m not making fun of either because my own reactions to criticism are in close parallel to theirs. A problem for actors and for writers: you can’t do either in full-battle armor. Nor can you let yourself sink into a sobbing heap because someone criticizes your choice of verb tense. And yet, you do. As best you can, you keep the sobbing sessions short and private.

Working on the query list. One agent I know I’ll query was the first one I dared approach some seven or eight years ago. Knocking on doors that slammed shut before – is that evidence of stupidity, of masochism or both? I don’t think so. If the fit struck me as likely then, and still strikes me as likely now, why should I not risk another rejection or even – imagine – risk a positive response?

The very first rejection my writing received is now a distant memory of shattered illusions. The editor had played at graciousness because I worked for a public figure to whom he wished to ingratiate himself. I’d missed the connection but got the message loud and clear. His was the only detailed rejection letter I ever received. Thankfully, his criticism was so far off the mark, the shattered illusions came with an unexpected feeling of relief. Nobody wants representation for the wrong reasons.

So, the balancing act. You write because, at some level, the child never learned to behave as demanded. Never learned how to not see what adults said did not exist. Somehow the rest of who you are has got to handle giving that kid the space to have and to be.