Flashbacks, Fast forwards

The time warp aspect has a paralyzing effect. Friends chaining themselves as a symbolic gesture of protest. Friends going on hunger strikes to no effect except ruining their health. The sound of truncheons beating on shields. The burning, choking, fear and adrenalin-soaked sensations associated with tear gas. The stronger, herding the weaker. Someone’s panic at being trampled causing him to trample on someone else and live with the shame. The knowledge that you can’t predict how you will react under severe stress. Not book knowledge – muscle, bone and sinew knowledge.

No big surprise: one of the characters lugs some of the past and present knowledge at the moment. Makes for slow going. In daily life, I have work to deliver, admin stuff to handle, some living and sleeping to throw into the mix. The numbing shows up – an invisible guest that puts the brain into freeze frame just when you need to be productive and delivering the goods, as promised and on schedule. Just when you need to be the one they know they can count on. Just when you need to be that one – stronger than the wimp, more together, sense of humor at the ready, some kind of funny Mother Courage with a clown nose and limitless amounts of resourcefulness.

Ha. Redux. In fact, I manage it – more or less – with twelve or thirteen-year old boys. They seem to have an ingrained streak of rebelliousness I find refreshing. Coaching them through their homework involves a lot of quipping and holding on to a bunch of principles. Whether the principles matter a whole lot or not. They seem to need to butt their horns while knowing the fence will hold.

Somewhere between the flashbacks and the anxiety-laden fast forwards: the narrow strip of ground, here and now. Here and now. Winning, for god sake. Once in a fucking while – winning instead of sticking a brave face on the losses. For variety’s sake, come on, let’s go for a win and leave the failing better for another day.

End of pep talk.

 

All in a day’s work

For the next part of the exercise, I take a fifteen hundred word synopsis and boil it down to its three hundred word essence.

Q : Am I demonstrating the concept of hubris by sending my work to these exalted places?

A : Depends. Hubris, yes, if the small-town swimmer imagines she’s an Olympic champion. She doesn’t. She just feels the need to keep pushing herself out of her depth. In this specific case, the real point is discovering what the three hundred word essence will be.

Rejections will follow, I’m sure of it. Or the utter silence that signals you’re not even good enough to warrant a reply. Should I get a positive from any agent at this point in my life as a writer, I’ll respond like the dog who’s caught the car by  chasing it down the street and barking. The odds are so slim, they don’t even leave room for stage fright. This is good.

Cloudy skies and temperatures way below average on this, the eve of the Street Festival. I doubt I’ll follow through on moving from one living space to another. There’s only so much you can get done in one day.

Allez? Allez.  With poetry, music and good old Sanford Meisner as part of the traveling kit.

Papa may have, and mama may have but…

What’s in a name? A lot. A pen name on my mailbox almost got me in trouble with social services, once. I was lucky: the inspector was a decent type. He accepted a glance at my manuscript as proof of my good faith, and didn’t insist on checking my bathroom for shaving cream.

What’s in a name. In Israel, I used my former husband’s – a familiar one in that country and easy to write in Hebrew script. In Canada, Toronto industry lawyers made condescending faces at me because of my French-Canadian patronym (so did the nice people at Screen Actors’ Guild in New York but they were better at smiling than were the lawyers). Here, I go by another former husband’s family name. So, all told, I’ve only tried out four names in my sixty-eight years. Which one comes closest to describing me? I don’t have a clue. Which one makes the most sense when sending a query letter? My current one, I guess but I have a sentimental attachment to the pen name. Plus, I like disguises.

So. Another read through the synopsis. Another read through the ms. Another disgraceful battle with the header feature. Another run through agent listings. I loathe rejection but then, who doesn’t.

I don’t own a car any more. Used to love driving. In the dream last night, I still owned one and my driver’s license hadn’t expired. God bless the child that’s got both.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changes*

For instance: a place to which you drive often enough to know your way from A to Z. Except, every single time you drive there, you have the same hesitation at one of the turns. Is it left or right, you ask yourself, feeling the same irritation and befuddlement. And making the same wrong choice every single time, much to your anger, frustration, and – should someone else be onboard – lasting damage to your image as a sweet, kind, patient, good-humored, smart, even-tempered yet vivacious etc etc etc.

This is my experience with a process any nitwit can manage i.e. dropping in author name and title of work on the top right-hand side of every page. I forget how to do it, every single time. I go through agonies of impatience. Start pasting the info, page after page after page, only to have the layout slide and the damn thing stuck in the middle of a page. This, while telling myself I should work on the synopsis instead, and to hell with labeling the pages before anyone’s asked to see the whole thing. Computers are great; they drive me nuts anyway. At times, I walk away from mine lest I hurl it out the closest window.

Uncertainty. Insecurity. Do you fight, do you flee, do you freeze? All three may work or make matters worse. When confusion sets in (contradictory messages, unfamiliar surroundings, untested or novel suggestions for dealing with the same old hang-up): straight ahead? up or down the nearest cliff? Time-out under the local version of a banyan tree?

The street festival starts on Friday. Maybe I’m watching the last of the rainfalls at the moment. Maybe the clouds will turn magnificent – the way they look on today’s astronomy picture of the day in rainbow hues above a mountain peak in Nepal.

Moving on in a sea of maybes.

* a song from some time back then. You know: back when you could set the tiny glitches right by  banging the offset press with a hammer or slapping the top of the TV set.

Keeping the faith, as they say

Not just refreshing sprinkles, here and there. Dense sheets of rain. Thunder, lightning, lights and sound systems veering toward brown-outs, then working back up to efficiency. Plus, unpredictable strike actions by the peons of the entertainment world in France, better known as les intermittents du spectacle i.e. most of the people with whom I hang out these days. This is the view, a few days before the local Street festival where some thirty groups of acrobats, jugglers, street actors and musicians are expected for the sixth annual Festival Rues d’Été de Graulhet.

C’est la vie, mon ami. Depending on factors too numerous to list, I veer toward being 1) the lights and sound systems on the verge of conking out 2) the stagehand rattling the sheet of metal to imitate the sound of thunder or 3) good old dazed one, awakening from a dream set in New York where a car stops millimeters away from a young man crossing the street without looking. The driver, winding his way through the hilliest version of New York ever recorded in my dreamtime, says I don’t like New York. I wake up. The rain, this morning, is of the fine slanted needles variety. New York is thousands of kilometers and many, many light-years away. For now, Graulhet is where I live and write.

Keeping the faith. As in: finishing the job. As in: finding the right words, the right beat, the right mix to best serve a story I care about. You don’t bother doing yet another total rewrite on something unless you really, really care about the people in the story, no matter how fictional they may be.

Sat next to a clown/stiltwalker yesterday during the viewing of Jacques Deschamps’ film Romanès. The fun of seeing people you know on screen, performing at their best in front of a delighted crowd in China. The craziness of knowing the bureaucratic hounding awaiting some  of these same performers. Representing France at a prestigious international event while having your work permit annulled?

ça aussi c’est la vie, mon ami. 

Music, music, music. Of whatever type needed to escape deadly undertows. I can’t afford it but I think I’ll buy the Krazy Kat collection anyway. Whatever works, my friend. Whatever works.

In-between places

I’ll be reading through again, of course. Plus, there’s the question of the title. Plus, new synopsis, new query letter, etc. But as the final bits in the final scene appeared, I understood something about the sources to the story. Two sources: one being a passage in a talk Albert Camus gave in the States once. The other, a note I scribbled in my copy of Jorge Semprun’s L’écriture ou la vie, years and years ago. In both instances, the topic was Good and Evil. In both, the point of inquiry was that place where the waters meld or separate. Something like a delta loaded down with silt from different streams. A place of potential for anything and everything.

In-between places. Where things can go one way or another. In his talk, given after  World War Two ended, Camus described the paradoxical behavior of a guard leading a prisoner back to his cell after an interrogation. Showing caring and compassion, only moments after displaying incredible brutality. Both behavior patterns thrown into stark relief by extreme circumstances. Something story attempts to do, the way a scientist tries to test a hypothesis in a controlled environment.

In-between places. Choices. Hormonal stews. Hormonal storms. Where we come from. Where we’ve been. Where we hope to go.  Plus something else. Something that says: try something different, this time. Watch the old program play out. Then, try something else. There’s more to the story than first meets the eye.

I’ll read through this one again. But there’s already something else wanting to come out and play – either a revision to another story I wrote after the first versions of this one, or something other with a different slant.

Fun and Games

“Tighten your account’s security,” they write, and give you the easy-to-follow instructions for doing so. Enter your mobile phone number, instructions read at step three or four or five. Everyone owns a mobile phone, right?

Wrong. Not everyone. I don’t. But never mind. Those who want to pry, will. Whether what they’ll find will be worth their while: for them to know. Maybe prying is like the thrill of cheating on an exam. Setting up the cheat may take more time than studying but the thrill’s the thing. Forbidden. Fattening. Illegal. Immoral. Whatever. The thrill. The cheaper the better? I’m not so sure about that.

Lost. Snarled. Conflicted. Forget The Art of Peace? Not much evidence for it working anywhere. Revenge? Vindication? Salvation? Redemption? A hit of dopamine, natural or store-bought?

A girl walks away from a mess, after contributing her tiny share to it all. A useless gesture, an extra bit of clean-up for others to handle. She’s just stuck out her thumb for a ride. The writer has no idea what vehicle is approaching, and neither does the character. Obvious possibilities abound. Obvious isn’t all that interesting, unless it produces unexpected results. What’s the point, other than one more ride around the mulberry bush?

Mean streets. Mean streaks. Caring anyway, the odds be damned.

Cry, Cry, Cry

A friend of mine who knows I sometimes work with people known here as “gens du voyage” (road people) offered me a novel by Alice Ferney called Grâce et Dénuement (Grace and Destitution). I read it yesterday afternoon. Followed the well-written, well-documented and moving story of a librarian who does weekly readings to the children at an illegal Gypsy encampment. Recognized the bitter price one of the little girls pays for admittance into a local school. Nodded at the evictions. Shaked my head at the worse than crummy living conditions where an old woman’s dearest wish is real wood for the campfire fuel, to replace garbage and smoldering discarded car seats. Put down the book and cried as an emotional and physical release.

Once the limbic system calmed down, I couldn’t fail to notice a mistake I would have made, had I written something similar myself. Although Ferney distinguishes the Gypsies from the Roms, she uses the words Manouche and Gitan interchangeably. My gitano friend set me straight on that one when I committed the same faux pas, two years ago. “Non, Lucie,” he explained, and mapped out three streams on the table. “We, les gitans, came up to Spain through Egypt. Les manouches settled in Germany. And the Roms – well, they’re from Romania, yes? The name says it.” My gitano friend feels for the manouches and the Roms the way a stalwart of the Church of England considers papists, or a Sunni talks about a Shi’ite. My friend is thrilled when I sing No tengo lugar y no tengo paisaje. I can imagine his grimace if I then segued into Bubamara in a We Are the World type medley.

Never mind. My gitano friend took the theoretical test this morning. The one he must pass to receive, what? A passport? No. Something way more important: a driving permit. He raced over here in close to a dead faint, repeating that  he passed the test. He’s convinced of it.  Rattled off his response to each and every one of the forty questions on the test. He’s promised me a party to end all parties when he gets official confirmation.

A daunting prospect. There’s honor involved when Gitanos party. I’d better get in more slow laps at the pool.

Meanwhile, in story and in my brain, Johnny Cash sings “I taught the weeping willow how to cry, cry, cry…” (Big River).

Kadima? OK.

Summer Programs in Social Studies

The social experiment – or call it what you will – confirms one truism at least: negative news leads to more of same,  and positive news generates positives in response. Congratulations to Facebook and the valiant teams of  university researchers for “proving” what the media demonstrates daily.

Nu, how do you stay sane in the onslaught? What does sane mean where you live? Plus – fundamental question : Can a sense of humor thrive despite all odds to the contrary? How did humor work its way into the genetic makeup? Playfulness exists at the animal level. Even old dogs react to play opportunities. Although this may be a case of anthropomorphism, I once had a dog whose behavior I considered mischievous to the point of putting a twinkle in his eye. But then, I also had a dog whose traumatic fear of thunderstorms could be controlled with earphones and the Second Movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

So maybe Facebook and university researchers should turn to more refined animal studies as their next contribution to the tiny flashes of insight in the vast fields of human ignorance? Or, while putting a new bathing suit to the test with slow laps in a pool, an aging human may hit upon a forgotten bit of knowledge  that demonstrates dolphins don’t only appear to laugh because their mouth curves upward. I must think on these things. (Hence I hit the category: protodraft).

In the reading mix, at the moment: Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad, in French. Ah, the first of the seven crusades when the cyborgs (or plain old first-generation computers) discover  Unity; explore Philosophy, Poetry, and the founding algorithms for small or medium-sized villages. Then, face off for battle only to discover… the enemy, smiling back on the hill across the valley. Only to… traipse down the hill under the furious eyes of their leaders, clear their throats with a blush, take an enemy by the hand and wander off to pick daisies in the field where the battle doesn’t happen.

Plus, at the local level: more  circus pictures for another exhibition, also in need of  a few words, here and there, as a garnish.

“Ma mère (qui était une femme) …”

The title is a direct quote from one of my former bosses. “My mother (who was a woman),” he intoned with the pause just before specifying his mother’s gender. There was an audible pause  from the assembled notables too, followed by some shifting on chairs, and eyes forward so as not to exchange dangerous glances with others.

The man – now deceased – was an actor, a television commentator, President of an Actors’ Union, and a political activist on the left-leaning side of the spectrum. His main strength resided in a set of vocal cords that produced a deep barytone somewhat like the distant rolling of thunder in the far, far hills. I happened to be the man’s press aid at the time. The press aid had strongly objected to his improvised haranguing of the troops. His deep barytone was best on scripted material. But he felt the irresistible calling from the microphone. None of the scripted bits live on in my mind the way this stunning revelation about his mother goes on ringing in my ears.

Lots of unattended bits in need of attention today at the local level, while the potboiler simmers in the background. Several of the characters want to grab center stage at this point. They know the final part of a story means one of them has to make a move the others didn’t expect. The others include the writer in many ways.

Ach. So many of the good lines I can’t use straight up as told to or in the presence of – yesterday provided a rich supply of one-liners. Pithy, funny (albeit of the Emergency Room variety of humor).

Only solution: concentrate on my homework (Duty) until the imp rebels. I know I can count on the imp insisting on making a Statement.

Allez. What do you think this is? A day off? Promises to keep, agenda items, hop hop hop.