A Most Charming Tour

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Czech Republic, small town, Europe

(photo: farm3.staticflickr.com)

A weekend break for all you armchair travelers, is this photo essay of the “25 Secret Small Towns in Europe You Must Visit” on the World of Wanderlust website. In the photo at left is Cesky Krumlov in southern Bohemia, Czech Republic. (No McDonalds, the caption writer celebrates or warns, depending).

Other small towns on this charm tour are scattered across Europe and possibly within driving reach if your travels take you to the larger cities in France, Austria, Belgium, Slovenia, Poland, England, Spain, Croatia, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, Malta, or Bosnia & Herzegovina. Or Turkey. Though I’ll bet not too many tourists make it to Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, even if they can spell (or pronounce) it. Is Greenland in Europe now?

The caption-writer for this essay ran out of synonyms for charm early on and defaulted to superlatives. “Most charming,” “so picturesque,” “most underrated.” Annency, France, below, is “arguably more charming than any other French town you will find.”

France, small town, Europe

(photo: pixabay, CC)

 

tulips, Holland, Mich., windmill

(rkramer, flickr)

Another non-European entry and representing the U.S.A., oddly, is Leavenworth, Kansas, which does not have much a a reputation as a place for a brief visit—20 years to life is more like it.

World of Wanderlust says Leavenworth is modeled on a Bavarian village, but if what you’re after is finding the Old World in the New, you might want to visit Holland, Michigan—especially at tulip time!

Writers as Storytellers

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front porch, rocking chair, storytelling

(photo: Lars Ploughmann, flickr)

Eric Nelson’s recent Ploughshares article describes the “10 times in life when writers have the upper hand.” Writers who can tell stories out loud and off the page, that is. As Nelson says, “With the right kinds of stories, you can sell anything, including yourself.”

I have a friend who writes monologs, and I’ve come to appreciate the amount of work that goes into shaping this material, polishing it, honing it, and then, hardest of all, making it sound spontaneous, fresh, alive. The impact of his stories on the page versus what happens when he “tells” them is transformative.

In the days before television, storytelling was a much-appreciated front porch gift that we’ve mostly lost track of. Even writers, who should be superb oral story tellers, may limit their audience to the glowing rectangle. We keep our best stories, the personal, true ones, locked up inside.

The organization The Moth (“True Stories Told Live”) sets out to preserve and celebrate oral storytelling, and a book of 50 “brilliant and quietly addictive” stories from its archive has five stars on Amazon. Like my friend’s work, the best stories display honesty, vulnerability–and a little structure. This is not the same storytelling as effectively recounting “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”; these are true stories of the kind familiar to This American Life addicts.

Life situations when Nelson says a good story—or the ability to put one together—comes in handy include childcare (“It’s easier to keep a car full of kids from hitting each other by entertaining them with stories than hoping their iPad batteries hold out”), the classroom—from first grade to adult education, parties, job interviews, dates, the doctor’s office, therapy, on juries, in political campaigns, and at the DMV (where everyone is bored silly “except the writers. They’re too busy working on their stories in their head”).

Nelson refers to a recent article by Neil Gaiman about being asked to appear at The Moth—something out of his comfort zone, and so a good reason to do it, Gaiman says. Something he says about the importance of stories really resonates, given this week’s news events: “And the gulf that exists between us is that when we look at each other we might see faces, skin colour, gender, race or attitudes, but we don’t see the stories. And once we hear them we realise that the things dividing us are often illusions, falsehoods: that the walls between us are no thicker than scenery.”

Tearful Fiction

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snowy owl, Hedwig

(photo: wikimedia.org)

What happens when a book character you’ve come to love dies—or a relationship you’ve treasured comes to naught? Grief, that’s what. The five stages of fictional grief—rereading (“did I get that right?”), dismay, rationalization and hope, anger (throw the book across the room), and never getting over it—are explored in an amusing Bookriot post by Susie Rodarme. Anger is appropriate when characters are killed off randomly, to keep them from cluttering up the plot any longer.

We saw a manifestation of these stages on social media when Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley came to his untimely end. “I can’t believe it!” “Nooooooo.” “I’m not watching any more!” “Maybe he’s not reaaally dead?” For readers of paranormal fiction, there’s always a chance . . .

Tess of the D’Urbervilles was a real weepy for me. I read it several times and, once I knew the ending, began getting weepy from page one (delicious!). Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (review here) is the most recent book that prompted those “why did she have to die?” feelings, and true regret that left me down for days.

The comments on Rodarme’s post are interesting. Must be a youngish crowd, since most of their literary tear-blotting experiences are associated with Harry Potter, and repeatedly cited is the death of Hedwig, a character introduced this way: “Harry now carried a large cage that held a beautiful snowy owl, fast asleep with her head under her wing.” I’m guessing many of those who say they grieved long and hard over Hedwig, subconsciously at least, recognize her death symbolized Harry’s loss of innocence, and that’s what they regret, as well.

****Mystery Girl

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

By David Gordon – This book
was a gift, so I knew nothing about it when I opened its pages and fell in love with its surprises. Funny, complicated, well-drawn characters—B-movie cinephiles—living on the tattered fringes of Hollywood. “Some things are inexplicable. The human heart is one. Los Angeles is another,” said the New York Post review. The story involves failed experimental novelist, abandoned husband, and tyro-detective Sam Kornberg’s search for Mona Naught, a woman of elusive identity and tenuous reality.

The first-person narrator’s voice, occasionally uncertain, is consistently insightful and entertaining. Here’s a description of a cemetery in Mexico: “a city of tiny palaces that the good citizens had constructed to house their souls, like elaborate birdcages or the dollhouses of spoiled girls, far more splendid than their own mortal homes. After all, we are alive a short while, dead forever.” That last tiny zinger is what makes it.

Or this unpromising exchange with the Korean housekeeper of his prospective employer, when she answered his knock:

“Warren?” she asked. “No, I’m not Warren. I’m Samuel. Sam really. Sam Kornberg.”

            “You show warrant?”

            “Oh, warrant,” I said. “I thought you said Warren. No, no warrant. I still don’t know what you mean.” . . .

“Norman?”

“No, not Norman either. I’m Sam.”

“No.” She spoke slowly, for my benefit, as if explaining a simple fact. “You are Mormon.”

“A Mormon? No, I’m not a Mormon. Sorry. Jewish, I’m afraid.”

Occasionally, the narration is interrupted by other narrators, with their critical observations about Sam and his shortcomings, which put his actions in a new light. Author Gordon, in a recent New York Times blog, describes writing as a “risky, humiliating endeavor.” No surprise, maybe that about his writing, the fictional Sam is skewering: “I myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn’t seem to stop writing . . . It seemed I had dedicated my life to a question whose point even I had forgotten along the way.” His detecting assignment from Solar Lonsky helped him find it again.

Spread the Love

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W.H.Auden, brownstone, Brooklyn

W. H. Auden’s Brooklyn home (photo: farm4.staticflickr.com)

Wired’s Mr. Know-It-All—a favorite feature of the magazine—provides answers to the ethical and practical challenges of the digital age. A question this month concerns friends who get “hundreds of likes” for every photo they post and whether there is really any point in adding one’s own tiny click, as it’s unlikely to be noticed in that cricket-storm of positive feedback. Hmmm.

Mr. Know-It-All dives into literature for his response by quoting a poem by W.H. Auden (1907-1973). Auden, contemplating the stars crowding the sky, recorded their sublime indifference to humans, which might lead one to think in the scheme of things, why bother with that “like”? Except that he continues to Auden’s next verse, which says the caring imbalance between yourself and the firmament is inevitable, and if caring cannot be equal, then let “the more loving one” be you. “Brilliant, right?” says Mr. Know-It-All. “The guy really understood Instagram.” So, pound that “like” button into stardust.

And why rampant “liking” doesn’t apply to news outlets and ads on Facebook!

What’s Your Green?

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Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Having a political discussion with my friend Don is almost impossible. In conversation, I avoid the hot-button issues I know will set him off. Unfortunately more of those topics crowd the landscape of his mind than I anticipate, and stumbling on one is like setting off a land-mine. Why is it we can’t just have a conversation? It’s because our points of view are so different, there’s little room for mutual understanding, and we might as well be speaking different languages. Point-of-view determines not only which facts each of us takes in, but also what we see when we look at something as quotidian as three people standing on the street corner.

In a recent Glimmer Train essay on point-of-view, Bret Anthony Johnston, director of creative writing at Harvard, wrote that his students get this concept when he trots out the old saying, “To a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” He says writers need to understand their characters’ obsessions—their hammerness—and those ten-penny features that loom so large in their minds. Sometimes their preoccupations are so consuming they don’t see the pile of screws right nearby or, more likely, interpret it as another pile of nails. “To the brokenhearted, every couple looks happy,” he says.

I’ve read Johnston’s award-winning book of short stories Corpus Christi: Stories, and this year he published the novel, Remember Me Like This (NPR review and interview). The novel deals with a family whose son disappeared, then is returned to them four years later. While he understood going in that this lost, this hiatus in relationships, would color every aspect of his characters’ lives, “what I didn’t know was how different and revelatory their perspectives would be.” Each family member reacted in a unique and shaping way, and required of Johnston—and the reader—different levels of empathy. “In fiction,” he says, “every detail is a Rorschach test” to be interpreted through the lens of the character. We ask about a character’s experience not “what does it mean?” but “what does it mean to her?” If we didn’t, we could never read with understanding the story of anyone not exactly like ourselves, should there be such a person.

Despite the popularity of multitasking and our self-deception about our skill at it, in truth our brains are pretty much wired to handle one thing at a time. This inattentional blindness, Johnston says, is “point-of-view in its purest form.” What captures our characters’ attention demonstrates what they are most interested in and care about the most. This is perhaps why the unimportant details that new writers include in their scenes—in a misguided effort to make them concrete—are so distracting. “Find out what your characters notice, find out where their gazes linger and why, and you’ll find out who your characters are.”

Johnston has published a nifty set of writing exercises, too, and he included one with this essay. You might try it. He suggests grabbing pen and paper and moving through your surroundings making a list of everything you see that’s green. (This will be a long list in my case, as I always say, “I don’t care what color it is, as long as it’s green.”)

see, eye, green

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Done? Did you notice particulars you’d forgotten about? Will you see items in your surroundings in a new way for a while? Were memories stimulated? Briefly, “green” was your mind’s obsession. I’ll bet dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists would create a somewhat different list than would a graphic designer.

“Now do the same thing for your characters,” Johnston says. “Find out what their ‘green’ is.” What readers need to know isn’t just what your characters look at, but, more important, what they see.

 

Keep Your Edge – 33 ways

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notebook, list, diary

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

These lists of how to stay creative keep coming around, and they’re always worth a glance. Staying fresh in our own world is important, no matter what world that is. “Make lists, carry a notebook everywhere, write your ideas down”—those suggestions are all of a piece, and I do that. Of course, later the urgent items I scribbled don’t always make sense.

“Go somewhere new, listen to new music, watch foreign films”—those suggestions are different ways of saying “Break out of your routine.” I could do that by following suggestion #31—“Clean your workspace,” which, if I did would probably turn up some of those mystery notes. #29, “Stop trying to be someone else’s perfect,” reminds me of the Steve Jobs admonition pasted above my computer: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Don’t quite know what to think of “be otherworldly.” That’s the kind of obscure directive I might write myself. For this weekend, just “Do more of what makes you happy!” (#25).

*** The Director

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Robin Hood

“Robin Hood’s Band Made Merry by Killing the King’s Deer” (photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

By David Ignatius (narrated by George Guidall). This thriller is set in the bowels of the nation’s national security apparatus, at the time a new CIA director is appointed who is not a Beltway insider, but plucked from the corporate world. The new director, Graham Weber, is pitted against the puppeteers of competing security agencies and (this is not a spoiler) a computer wizard inside the Agency who has gone rogue, James Morris.

How much readers like the book seems to depend on how excited they were by the electronic shenanigans of Morris, though there didn’t seem to be a lot new there—not for readers of Wired, anyway. Still, while Morris and his network were entertaining, the old-school-tie boys on Weber’s other flank were palpably less convincing. The women in the story fell into their respective stereotypes. A flimsy seduction scene is best ignored.

But the bigger problem—and where this book diverges from the best writing of, say, Neal Stephenson—is that, while it has the geeky stuff down, it has no social science sense. “Rob from the banks of the rich countries and give to the poor ones?” Really? Which poor countries would that be? Zimbabwe? North Korea? Myanmar? Uganda? Many of the world’s poorest countries stay that way because the leadership class steals everything they can get their hands on. Sending them “free” cash makes no sense. I didn’t want to read a lecture on political science and economics, but needed some acknowledgement that such sophisticated technologists thought deeper than a Robin Hood fantasy. Unfortunately, this gap undercuts their whole motivation for the crime.

If you can ignore that problem, and if you, like me, worry about our growing electronic vulnerabilities, you may like this book! And, you’ll notice the similarities in supposed high-mindedness between Morris and real-life cyber-spy Ed Snowden.

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Robin Williams

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stars, heavens, night sky

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Still not recovered from the too-soon loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, now this.

Scientists unraveling the neural links between mental illness and creative genius may one day have more answers to today’s painful questions.

Knowing anguish comes with the territory, though, apparently doesn’t lessen it, nor reduce the need for the ultimate, last escape.

Not for Hemingway, not for Plath, not for Williams, not for so many.

Creativity is UP!

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Up, Navy Pilot

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) is a classic study of the way metaphor shapes our understanding of the world. Published in 1980, it dismisses the idea that metaphors are strictly a matter of language, the frosting on the cake of meaning, as argued by various competing philosophical and linguistic traditions. In what I usually read, the search for truth is conducted not by academics, but by a fictional detective, so some of this was heavy going. Where the authors dig into the language, their examples are fascinating.

Lakoff and Johnson are not generally talking about literary metaphors, but rather about the ones so thoroughly absorbed into the language that we no longer notice them as metaphors. One fundamental set of such metaphors reflects “orientation”: up-down, in-out, back-front, and so on. Although some metaphors in this set appear to be more or less universal across languages, others are more culturally determined. In Western culture, many common phrases reflect the metaphor “happy is up” and its opposite, “sad is down.” Examples are:

  • That boosted my spirits.
  • I’m depressed.
  • It gave him a lift.
  • My heart sank.
  • Being up-beat.

Extending this pattern, health and life are up:

  • It’s time to get up.
  • He’s at the pinnacle of health.
  • Lazarus rose from the dead.
  • She sank into a coma.

More is up (this one, we even represent graphically):

  • My income rose last year.
  • The Dow reached a new high.

Having control is up:

  • He’s at the height of his powers.
  • She has control over the situation.

And so on. This metaphor is so pervasive, we don’t notice it. The other orientation pairs are embedded in the language in much the same way, and from the various concepts they signify, they form a coherent way of understanding our world.

Lakoff and Johnson also discuss how we depend on metaphor to help us structure inherently vague concepts, like emotions, in terms of more concrete things we may have directly experienced. Complex emotions, like love or anger, have inspired many overlapping (and sometimes conflicting) metaphors. For example:

  • Love (vague) is a journey (concrete).
  • Anger (vague) is hot (concrete).

The “love is a journey” metaphor underlies statements like: “We’re on the road to romance” (think Sinatra’s: “Nice ‘n’ Easy”); “It’s a rocky road to love.”; “We went in different directions.”; or “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” The “anger is hot” metaphor leads to: “I was boiling mad”; “Cool it!”; and “in the heat of the moment.” (Icy cold anger is scary perhaps because it’s so counterintuitive.)

I’m trying to understand all this (which is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, you understand) in terms of writing. “We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor,” say Lakoff and Johnson. The orientation metaphors and their many variants perhaps explain why, a writer’s attempts to create a literary metaphor sometimes miss the mark. Perhaps they have violated this coherent, and implicit language system.

A linguistic exploration of the metaphors underlying emotion seems to me like an endorsement of the frequent dictum: “show, don’t tell.” Simply saying that a fictional character feels love or anger or happiness conveys little to the reader, because readers will have different ways—and many competing ways—of interpreting that emotion, depending on the metaphors through which they see the world. The metaphors underlying those feelings must be expressed—and in some fresh way that is consistent with the existing substrate (safer) or totally new, stretching both writer and reader.

Read more at: The Literary Link and, for some juicy literary metaphors, Welcome to the World of Metaphor.

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