Starvation Season

Writing a horror story in iambic pentameter is like eating tomato soup with a toothpick: you can vaguely sort of taste a hint of soup, but days and days and days will pass before you quench the hunger.

The Pot Holes of Narrative Verse

Anyone who writes a narrative in verse form must avoid two dangers:

1) Prosaic verse.

If the verse reads more like prose than poetry, then why write verse at all?

2) Bathos.

In his essay, "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry," published in 1728, Alexander Pope quoted page after page of examples in which verse had gone wrong, because the writers had used bizarre, extended metaphors to give ordinary details and events an ersatz glow of "poetic" language.

The results are bloated and ridiculous poems in which too much is written about nothing much:

Who knocks at the door?

For whom thus rudely pleads my loud-tongu'd gate,
That he may enter?

See who is there?

Advance the fringed curtains of thy eyes,
And tell me who comes yonder.

Shut the door.

The wooden guardian of our privacy
Quick on its axle turn.

Bring my clothes.

Bring me what nature, tailor to the bear,
To man himself deny'd; she gave me cold,
But would not give me clothes.

Light the fire.

Bring forth some remnant of Promethean theft,
Quick to expand th' inclement air, congeal'd
By Boreas's rude breath.

Snuff the candle.

Yon' luminary amputation needs,
Thus shall you save its half extinguish'd life.

Open the letter.

Wax! render up thy trust.

Uncork the bottle, and chip the bread.

Apply thine engine to the spungy door:
Set Bacchus from his glassy prison free,
And strip white Ceres of her nut-brown coat.

Somehow, the writer of any narrative poem has to steer between these two pot holes.

It can be done, if the writer is willing to economize. Stripping the narrative down to its essential details to remove the empty baggage of most fiction; seeking appropriate metaphors and imagery for the most important moments and moods of the story, while letting the unimportant ones pass by as quickly as possible; trusting the reader to infer the number "four" when offered "two plus two" -- all of these approaches might work.

To make them work remains a challenge, and one that I am failing.

Dead On The Page

Despair at your own first drafts can arise from a lack of self-confidence, but can also creep up on you because you live by aesthetic standards.

You can trick your idiot mind into self-confidence, but no degree of self-delusion can fool you into mistaking trash for treasure.

What Is Heritage?

I see heritage as less of a longing for a cultural golden past, than a series of conversations over time with people of yesterday. Because the intent of these conversations is not to create a golden age for tomorrow, but to navigate the complexities of life as it is today, these people have won the right to be heard; they, too, confronted the challenges of their day with open eyes, and what they learned in the process deserves our consideration and our memory.

Tested Over Time

Whenever I take a shallow online test to determine my political positions, I always end up in the same corner: extreme left, extreme libertarian. Yet despite this, I am very much a cultural conservative, because I believe that tradition is an open doorway into the past, where methods of art were beaten into shape like bronze, and tested over centuries. I believe, as well, that traditional methods can be used to test my own abilities, to show what I can do within and against a framework that has remained steady over time. Without such a framework, how could I judge myself? How could I correct myself, whenever I fall short or fall apart?


What I do not believe is that everyone must be tested against this framework, that everyone must embrace the traditions I love.

I have my own preferences, and they guide me whenever I try to read, to watch, to hear something new. There are many works of today that I love, and many more that I find opaque, but these are my responses. If I am unable to understand why certain people write or compose or paint or direct in certain ways, I try to contrast their methods with methods that work for me, so that I can understand why something might not communicate, but I do this for myself. I am not a critic; I am, instead, a technician. I do not want to tell others what they should or should not enjoy; I want, instead, to understand the methods that appeal to me, so that I can use them for my own purposes.

So yes: I am left, I am libertarian. I am also culturally conservative, but the methods I conserve are for me, and for what I hope to do.

Clement Greenberg, Kitsch, and Unjustified Assumptions

Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in ART AND CULTURE: CRITICAL ESSAYS. Beacon Press, Boston, 1961.

My response to Greenberg's essay calls for an essay in itself, but right now, depression makes this impossible for me. Instead, I offer my apology, and these notes.

We do what we can with what we are.

- - - - - -

In 1939, for PARTISAN REVIEW, Clement Greenberg wrote:

"A society, as it becomes less and less able, in the course of its development, to justify the inevitability of its particular forms, breaks up the accepted notions upon which artists and writers must depend in large part for communication with their audiences.... All the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, are thrown into question, and the writer or artist is no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works."

I agree; this clearly happens.

"In the past such a state of affairs has usually resolved itself into a motionless Alexandrianism, an academicism in which the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy, and in which creative activity dwindles to virtuosity in the small details of form, all larger questions being decided by the precedent of the old masters. The same themes are mechanically varied in a hundred different works, and yet nothing new is produced: Statius, mandarin verse, Roman sculpture, Beaux-Arts painting, neo-republican architecture."

This, too, can happen, but is it the only result? Why must technical virtuosity in details of form be considered "motionless?" Is it not also possible for artists who work in traditional forms to reflect upon the perplexities and challenges of their day, and to present a subjective, living response through art?

"In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore: -- avant-garde culture. [...] It developed that the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to 'experiment,' but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. 'Art for art's sake' and 'pure poetry' appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague."

Indeed, this is one direction that art can take in a time of crisis, but why should it be considered the only way "to keep culture moving?" And what does it mean, "to keep culture moving"? Must culture have a direction? Could it not be, instead, a multiplicity of human responses?

"It has been in search of the absolute that the avant-garde has arrived at 'abstract' or 'nonobjective' art -- and poetry, too. The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape -- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself."

Again, I agree that art can take this direction. But why must it be considered the only valid direction? Is a concern for content always a dead end?

"But the absolute is absolute, and the poet or artist, being what he is, cherishes certain relative values more than others. The very values in the name of which he invokes the absolute are relative values, the values of aesthetics. And so he turns out to be imitating, not God -- and here I use 'imitate' in its Aristotelian sense -- but the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves. This is the genesis of the 'abstract.' In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft. The nonrepresentational or 'abstract,' if it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the world of common, extroverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the subject matter of art and literature. If, to continue with Aristotle, all art and literature are imitation, then what we have here is the imitation of imitating."

I agree that abstraction is a valid response, but I cannot see it as the only valid response.

"From the point of view of this formulation, Surrealism in plastic art is a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore 'outside' subject matter. The chief concern of a painter like Dali is to represent the processes and concepts of his consciousness, not the processes of his medium."

But this can only seem "reactionary" if you assume that art must take one direction only, and that this one direction must lead, inevitably, to one preoccupation: "the processes of a medium."

"That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating -- the fact itself -- calls for neither approval nor disapproval. It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome... but there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still. And this, precisely, is what justifies the avant-garde's methods and makes them necessary. The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means is it possible today to create art and literature of a high order."

There are too many unjustified assumptions, here. What does it mean for culture to "move"? Culture is an expression of human meaning, and this in itself implies many directions, many possible approaches. Avant-garde culture is one approach, but I see no valid reason to call it "the only means available today to create art and literature of a high order." (The question of what it means for art and literature to be of a high order is worth a separate discussion.)

This is where things become complicated:

"Simultaneously with the entrance of the avant-garde, a second new cultural phenomenon appeared in the industrial West... Kitsch: popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc. [...] Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy. [...] Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in addition to being able to read and write, could command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort. This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations, since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes. [...] The peasants who settled in the cities as proletariat and petty bourgeois learned to read and write for the sake of efficiency, but they did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of the city's traditional culture. Losing, nevertheless, their taste for the folk culture whose background was the countryside, and discovering a new capacity for boredom at the same time, the new urban masses set up a pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. [...] Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money -- not even their time."

I agree.

"The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience."

Indeed. But --

"Self-evidently, all kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that's academic is kitsch."

This does not follow, neither in formal logic, nor in life.

The assumption, here, seems to be that the use of traditional, formal techniques in art and literature is necessarily academic, necessarily dead. I disagree, because techniques can be used in service of personal perspective, personal vision.

"What is called the academic as such no longer has an independent existence, but has become the stuffed-shirt 'front' for kitsch. The methods of industrialism displace the handicrafts."

Yes, but personal expression is not industrialism.

Consider the case of music. In the 20th Century, avant-garde priorities included atonality, serialism, aleatory music, and so on, all of them valid, all of them interesting, but none of them, in my opinion, necessarily more valid, more interesting, than personal expression in traditional forms. Composers who worked in traditional forms and used traditional (albeit extended and often extreme) harmonic language were not always "industrial" or "academic" artists. Vaughan Williams, Rubbra, Simpson, Brian, Finzi, Bliss, Wordsworth, Roussel, Nielsen, Mahler, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, Saygun, Martinu, Freitas Branco, Braga Santos, and so on, wrote living music in traditional forms. Why should they be considered any less valid, any less committed to art and culture, than the avant-garde composers?

"It is not a question of a choice between merely the old and merely the new... but of a choice between the bad, up-to-date old and the genuinely new. The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch."

Again, assumption unjustified. Greenberg offers a false choice between the avant-garde and kitsch, but readers and art lovers have easy access to art and literature of the past; they also have access to writers and artists who use the methods of the past to convey personal impressions of the modern day. They might do this well or badly, and their efforts can be criticized, but they remain living creators, not machine assembly lines.

The question remains: is kitsch easy to recognize when it moves beyond its corporate, assembly-line origins? Is it not possible, instead, that too broad a definition for kitsch might cloud the issue, and lead us to make arbitrary value judgements?

For example, Greenberg argues that the paintings of Repin are kitsch:

"In Repin's picture the [Russian] peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures -- there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention and say to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intends to represent Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man. That Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator -- that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: 'it tells a story.'"

Why is immediate recognition of physical forms a limitation? Why is a response to the narrative potential of art an invalid response?

I believe that people can respond to art in many ways, from an appreciation of aesthetic technique (art for the sake of art), to emotional and imaginative engagement with what the art seems to imply. This variety of response can make critical evaluations difficult, but then again, people have argued about standards of art for thousands of years; why should they stop now? The argument itself is worthwhile; it forces us to think, to evaluate our own impressions, to communicate the substance of our inner lives.

"It can be said that the cultivated spectator derives the same values from Picasso that the peasant gets from Repin, since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on however low a scale --"

But who determines that scale, and, given the variety of possible responses, how?

"-- And he is sent to look at pictures by the same instincts that send the cultivated spectator. But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter. They are not immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must be projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities. They belong to the 'reflected' effect. In Repin, on the other hand, the 'reflected' effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the spectator's unreflective enjoyment."

Again, I have to ask: is imaginative and emotional engagement with the narrative implications of art an invalid, "unreflective" response? Or is it merely one of many valid responses?

"Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art."

I agree that some art works are more difficult, more challenging to process than others, but Greenberg seems to imply that only abstraction can lead to this challenge. What about tonal ambiguity? What about thematic or emotional complexity? These demand effort as well. HAMLET is hardly a work of abstraction, but people have argued about its implications for centuries, now, and the arguments continue.

"The Romantics can be considered the original sinners whose guilt kitsch inherited. They showed kitsch how. What does Keats write about mainly, if not the effect of poetry upon himself?"

Why is this invalid? Why is a human response to art less worthy of expression than a response to a tree, or to the sky, or to the looming threat of death? To write about the effect of poetry on yourself is not an act of predigestion, not a short cut, if the result is also poetry.

Is art one thing, or many? Does it have one valid pathway to follow, or many? Is only one type of response valid, or can people respond in many ways?

I can accept several points that Greenberg raises, especially about the dangers and limitations of kitsch, which I prefer to call corporate product, and which has driven art into the shadows of marginalization. Where Greenberg and I differ is that I see art, and the responses to art, as a living world, and not as a conceptual monolith.

Hell! Said The Duchess

[From 1999: one of the many book reviews I posted on the alt.books.ghost-fiction Usenet group.]


MILD SPOILERS.


In 1983, Karl Edward Wagner cited Michael Arlen's HELL! SAID THE DUCHESS as one of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels ever written. I can only wonder why.


More novella than novel, the book reads for the most part like a mildly amusing Firbank story without Firbank's melancholy... or one of Waugh's satires without the sting... or a Wodehouse farce without the carefully-prepared pratfalls.


Ninety-five percent of the book is undeniably funny, but the humour is as light and fluffy as meringue:

"Mrs. Nautigale had a pronounced gift for collecting the most intimate friendships possible with men and women who could never overcome their surprise at having been collected. They then found themselves subjected to the alarming process of being pinned down, exhibited and fed in groups of not fewer than twenty, at which it was taken for granted that a good time was being had by all, though no one knew exactly why.


"She was the soul of kindness, gave money freely to the rich, and had built her success as a hostess on having cleverly observed that there is no one like the distinguished Anglo-Saxon for enjoying a series of free meals provided that nothing, and particularly no conversation, is asked of him or her in return."

And so on, page after page, like Saki without the venom. Not even a series of sex-murders committed, it seems, by the chaste and proper Duchess of Dove can darken the mood, and the police investigation into these crimes is played for laughs:

"My valet and I have been taking it in turns to follow her day and night for several days, and we have also searched her rooms in Camberwell."


"An illegal act," said Icelin. "We also found nothing."

As Arlen's cardboard-cutout detectives wander through their investigations, his crisp, imageless prose is consistently arch and amusing, but to little point. The book goes on, with no emotional resonance, no atmosphere, no sense of place, no people to care about, and no sense of horror whatsoever.


But then, in the last twenty pages, Arlen suddenly veers into Arthur Machen territory when his buffoons encounter an Ancient Evil hot for sex and bloodshed:

"He could see nothing at all but her eyes, nothing in the whole world but two eyes. And then he could see two black bright points. He wanted to shut his eyes tight against them, but he was without any will at all. And he felt the coils of a snake around him. He saw the two black bright points of a snake’s eyes reared above his head. He felt his hands caressing the rough sensuous coils. Then he found himself lying on his back on the sofa with her body pressed down on him and her pointed tongue darting in and out of his mouth."

This final scene, with its violent eroticism and supernatural horror, takes the reader by surprise and is undeniably effective. Even Arlen's imageless prose adds to the sense of danger, as his detectives struggle to avoid any glimpse of the thing confronting them. They are completely unprepared for this daylight nightmare; the book ends grimly.


Certain elements in the story, like the hints of a fascist coup and class riots in Great Britain, never come together in any meaningful way, which gives the novel a hasty, improvised feel. The climactic shift in tone reinforces this impression, and its abrupt leap from detached meringue-amusement to sex-and-death evil makes the finale seem like a separate story grafted onto a dying novel.


Sadly, then, I find it impossible to call HELL! SAID THE DUCHESS a good horror novel, despite its admittedly effective final pages.


And I can only wonder why Karl Edward Wagner chose to call it great.

Useless Characters, Lousy Writing

Bad writing in Hollywood....

Why would any film include a character who adds nothing to the plot, who could be booted from the story without loss, and worst of all, who sucks valuable time and focus away from the characters who should matter? It seems an obvious mistake, one to catch early in the writing of a script, and yet, three recent films have been crippled by this easily-avoidable miscalculation.

ROGUE ONE: What purpose did Forrest Whitaker play in this film? His entire digression did nothing but take up time that could have been spent on developing the other characters, in answering questions that would have strengthened the plot (such as why Riz Ahmed chose to defect in the first place -- he must have had a reason, but the film never bothers to show it).

THOR BARBARELLAROK: You watched this film to see Skurge, right? Skurge was the most important character, the one person who absolutely had to be in this pile of puke, right? Wrong? You had no idea who he was, or why he mattered? Neither did I. Yet there he is, wasting valuable screen time with Cate Blanchett. Why not toss him out of the script, and have Cate match wits with someone central to the story?

BLACK PANTHER: Why is Andy Serkis here? Why do people waste half the film to capture him, when he does nothing and adds nothing? His entire sub-plot could have been avoided by having Killmonger walk up to the border of Wakanda to show off a lip tattoo. All of the story time wasted on Serkis could have been used to develop Wakandan society, which desperately needed to make sense for the plot to make sense. No such luck.

Why does it happen? Are characters chosen by committee, and actors hired, before the scripts have been completed? This would be a wasteful and clumsy way to make a movie, but here we have three of them caught in the same bizarre trap -- a trap that could have been avoided by one press of a writer's DELETE key.

A Strong Passive Voice

In these terrible times of grief and destruction, can we spare a moment to talk about the passive voice?

I have read more nonsense in books on writing about the need to avoid, at all cost, any major use of the passive voice. This counsel offers a core of truth, in that using the passive without discrimination can reduce the force of prose, but it also shrugs aside legitimate functions of the passive that can make prose efficient and smoothly readable.

Consider, for example, a paragraph in which unity and clarity depend on the use of a consistent subject:

"As a child, I was terrified by beets. If I met them on the road, I ducked into black alleys to avoid them; if I saw them on the trees, I dove into storm drains to hide myself in the muck. I was victimized in every possible way by crippling fears, and I knew these fears in the purpled forms of beets."

Another example:

"The clay squid haunted my family for generations. It brooded on its mantle over the TV set and glared as we watched HOWDY DOODY, scowled with no less ferocity as we shifted to CAPTAIN KANGAROO and SESAME STREET, sneered with an equal contempt as we devoted our waning lives to various mutations of STAR TREK. It hated all of our TV shows, until it was battered into shards by one of the grandchildren during a marathon week of DANCING WITH THE JERKS."

If used with intelligence and care, the passive voice can become an essential tool in the box of prose.

Notes To Myself, April 2013

Two nights ago, I watched CASABLANCA for the second time, and again, I have to ask why such a well-regarded film leaves me empty.

The most obvious factor against it is the appalling score by Max Steiner, whose work I have never liked. As usual for him, the score is too obvious: "We've got Germans here, I'll play 'Deutschland über alles.' Oh, look, it's Paris; I'll play 'La Marseillaise.' Every emotion is underlined, pinpointed, and specified with blaring orchestration: "You will react like THIS.'"

And that, I believe, extends to the entire film: it takes you by the hand and tells you how to interpret the images and moods, what to feel as the frames pass by. It leaves nothing to the imagination, nothing to your own personal perspective or judgement. For example, it cannot leave Rick to help the Bulgarian couple and to allow us to judge his intervention; no, his help must be underlined, pointed out and reinforced by the other characters, the direction and the glaring, blaring music.

As a fascinating contrast, I would cite Renoir's LA RÈGLE DU JEU, a film that refuses to take your hand, or to pinpoint what and how you should feel about it. The result is remarkably disturbing and effective.

Yet even if I stuck with the Hollywood studio system from that era, I could mention Huston's ASPHALT JUNGLE, which again refuses to take your hand. (And I note, as well, that Miklos Rozsa goes places with his five-minute score that Steiner never dreamed of.)

I need to think about this: the danger of too much audience control.

A side note: I recently watched the film ZODIAC twice, and again, despite the obvious high quality of that film, I believe that something is missing. Is it the lack of subtext? -- because, after all, ZODIAC goes out of its way to put its inner workings right there on the screen. Case in point: the sequence in which the two detectives enter the newsroom and walk through ghostly walls of cipher code. All right, all right, we get the point. These details are best implied, not shown. Showing them is all too tidy, and it leaves us with nothing to mull over when the final credits have rolled. Again, Renoir did this kind of thing with so much more finesse in LA RÈGLE DU JEU, and he left the subtexts in the sub, for the viewers to discover on their own.

"I must remember this...."

Notes To Myself -- Thursday, March 07, 2019

I would rather do anything than write this, and so, I need to write this.

Last night I walked to the university in Ottawa where my sister does graduate work, to return a pair of books that she had found for me through interlibrary loan.

With the cold March wind at my back, I walked along the Rideau Canal, where my last girlfriend had loved to skate; I walked past the National Arts Centre, where we had gone to concerts; past a museum where we had spent a wonderful afternoon, past her second-favourite vegetarian restaurant, past what had once been the organic food market where I had helped her to shop. None of these locations altered my mood, because in our few years together, we had biked and walked all over this town and throughout my own section of Québec. No matter where I go, no matter what I do, I find myself immersed in memories of her, and of what we shared.

In the past, I have lived with chronic physical pain -- not for too long, thank goodness -- but for six years, now, I have lived with chronic emotional pain. People in pain learn to compensate by limping in unusual ways, by not moving in rhythms that other people take for granted, by adopting patterns of life and outlook that other people might find limiting. We do this to survive, and after a while, survival methods become a habit that can be hard to explain. There is no question that people consider me odd.

"Time heals all wounds," people say, and in the long term of decades, this might be true. In six years, however, my pain has become worse. Nothing helps. I surround myself with beauty, with books and art and music. I bike like a maniac in spring, summer, and fall. I write books that few people read, and a blog that nobody reads. I do my best to keep busy, but nothing helps.

Decades ago, a woman who taught me yoga suggested that I take muscle-relaxant pills for just one week. Why? She wanted me to feel what it was like to be relaxed. Once I knew how it felt to feel normal, I would never again tolerate my usual symptoms of tension.

I never did take the pills. But decades later, I found myself happy in a relationship, happy in ways that I had never been before, and have never been since.

Having been happy, I now find it hard to carry the weight of my normal unhappiness. And so I limp in unusual ways, and people consider me odd.

A Kind Of Nothing

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi.

The most chilling passage I've read in recent months, and one that creeps up on me when my thoughts are elsewhere, is the final scene of this play, with Bosola and the Cardinal on the verge of death.

Even as he dies, even with only seconds left to him, Bosola cannot let go of his hatred for the Cardinal:

"I hold my weary soul in my teeth;
'Tis ready to part from me. I do glory
That thou, which stood'st like a huge pyramid
Begun upon a large and ample base,
Shalt end in a little point, a kind of nothing."

As a man who had been badly used and cheated, Bosola is crippled with resentment; and this resentment, a constant motif during the play, will not let him rest, not even at the end.

"Revenge for the Duchess of Malfi murdered
By the Arragonian brethren; for Antonio
Slain by this hand; for lustful Julia
Poison'd by this man; and lastly for myself,
That was an actor in the main of all
Much 'gainst mine own good nature, yet i' the end
Neglected."

Neglected. The word rings out like an epitaph.

As for the Cardinal, who can be angry "without rupture," who conceals his emotions even as he burns with hatred, his final words are even more disturbing:

"Look to my brother:
He gave us these large wounds, as we were struggling
Here i' th' rushes. And now, I pray, let me
Be laid by and never thought of."

At the very least, Bosola can be seen and understood, but the Cardinal is not a man to reveal himself. In the end, he not only wants to die, he wants to be erased from human history.

Ford Madox Ford on Impressionism

"The passage in prose which I always take as a working model... occurs in a story by de Maupassant called 'La Reine Hortense.' I spent, I suppose, a great part of ten years in grubbing up facts about Henry VIII. I worried about his parentage, his diseases, the size of his shoes, the price he gave for kitchen implements, his relation to his wives, his knowledge of music, his proficiency with the bow. I amassed, in short, a great deal of information about Henry VIII... I then wrote three long novels all about that Defender of the Faith. But I really know -- so delusive are reported facts -- nothing whatever. Not one single thing! Should I have found him affable, or terrifying, or seductive, or royal, or courageous? There are so many contradictory facts; there are so many reported interviews, each contradicting the other, so that really all that I know about this king could be reported in the words of Maupassant, which, as I say, I always consider as a working model. Maupassant is introducing one of his characters, who is possibly gross, commercial, overbearing, insolent; who eats, possibly, too much greasy food; who wears commonplace clothes -- a gentleman about whom you might write volumes if you wanted to give the facts of his existence. But all that de Maupassant finds it necessary to say is: 'C'était un monsieur à favoris rouges qui entrait toujours le premier.'


"And that is all that I know about Henry VIII -- that he was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a door."

-- From
"On Impressionism," by Ford Madox Hueffer.
In POETRY AND DRAMA Volume II, edited by Harold Munro. The Poetry Bookshop, London, 1914.

Stifled By The Darkness

Because I think of WILD STRAWBERRIES as one of Bergman's most positive and life-affirming movies, I chose it as a doorway to introduce his work to my last girlfriend. She hated the film, called it "too dark," and could not be persuaded to watch anything else by Bergman.

I have to concede that the film's warm, serene ending comes at the cost of great struggle by the characters. Anxieties, bleak memories, losses, nightmares: all of these are pitfalls on the way to reconciliation and peace, so much so that any viewer coming into the story halfway through could easily mistake this for a horror film.

What is horror: a result, or a process?

Many stories and films deal with a process of horror, but reach a happy ending -- a well-deserved, painfully-gained sense of closure in the daylight. I would never suggest that such films are less fascinating or beautiful than films that result in horror. BLUE VELVET, INLAND EMPIRE, ORPHÉE, VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS, VAMPYR, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, THE QUEEN OF SPADES: these end in daylight or in peace, but I still consider them great films that would appeal to horror viewers.

On the other hand, I think of horror as a result, as a mood that remains and overwhelms a story. My favourite horror films leave me in the dark: DAY OF WRATH, DEAD OF NIGHT, SECONDS, LES YEUX SANS VISAGE, PSYCHO, THE BIRDS, THE INNOCENTS, L'ANNÉ DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD, SOLARIS, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, THE BODY SNATCHER, LEMORA.

Many of Bergman's films also lead into darkness: WINTER LIGHT, SHAME, HOUR OF THE WOLF, PERSONA, THE SERPENT'S EGG. Other films are equally horrific, but end with a hard-won mood of hope: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, WILD STRAWBERRIES, and perhaps even THE SILENCE.

As my last girlfriend made clear to me, for some people, a happy result might not cancel out an unhappy process. For them, a story might end in daylight, but their memories of that experience are stifled by the darkness.

Broken-Back Sentences

How to write badly with broken-back sentences: take a weak verb, add a present participle afterthought. Repeat until the reader pukes.

Examples from "Sandkings," by George R. R. Martin.

- - - - - - - - -

The reds were the most creative, using tiny flakes of slate to put the gray in his hair.

The small scarlet mobiles were frozen, watching.

The lines closed around it, covered it, waging desperate battle.

He stopped at her table briefly and told her about the war games, inviting her to join them.

He waved it back and forth, smashing towers and ramparts and walls.

Sand and stone collapsed, burying the scrambling mobiles.

He watched for a moment, wondering whether he’d killed the maw.

“Easy,” he said, holding his head.

The shambler came peering round a corner to see what the noise was.

Kress went through the house room by room, turning on lights everywhere he went until he was surrounded by a blaze of artificial illumination.

He paused to clean up in the living room, shoveling sand and plastic fragments back into the broken tank.

The body shifted once again, moving a few centimeters toward the castle.

He retreated upstairs, returning shortly with a cleaver.

The screen began to clear, indicating that someone had answered at the other end.

He listened for several uneasy moments, wondering if Idi Noreddian could possibly have survived, and was now scratching to get out.

The black castle was glittering with volcanic glass, and sandkings were all over it, repairing and improving.

He stood his ground, sweeping his misty sword before him in great looping strokes.

One landed on his faceplate, its mandibles scraping at his eyes for a terrible second before he plucked it away.

The mist settled back on him, making him cough.

They were all around him, on him, dozens of them scurrying over his body, hundreds of others hurrying to join them.

Kress heard a loud hiss, and the deadly fog rose in a great cloud from between his shoulders, cloaking him, choking him, making his eyes burn and blur.

He stumbled and screamed, and began to run back to the house, pulling sandkings from his body as he went.

Inside, he sealed the door and collapsed on the carpet, rolling back and forth until he was sure he had crushed them all.

The canister was empty by then, hissing feebly.

His hand shook as he poured, slopping liquor on the carpet.

He sat at the console, frowning.

Their skimmer passed low overhead first, checking out the situation.

The black army burned and disintegrated, the mobiles fleeing in a thousand different directions, some back toward the castle, others toward the enemy.

Kress pounded wildly on the window, shouting for attention.

He brought it down sharply, hacking at the sand and stone parapets.

The laser bit into the ground, searching round and about.

Then he used the lasercannon, crisscrossing methodically until it was certain that nothing living could remain intact beneath those small patches of ground.

“Is that safe in here?” he found himself muttering, pointing at the flamethrower.

She stepped into the door, shifted the laser to her left hand, and reached up with her right, fumbling inside for the light panel.

He closed his eyes and waited, expecting to feel their terrible touch, afraid to move lest he brush against one.

His shambler followed him down the stairs, staring at him from its baleful glowing eyes.

Kress slipped outside, carrying his bags awkwardly, and shut the door behind him.

For a moment he stood pressed against the house, his heart thudding in his chest.

Kress smiled, and walked slowly across the battleground, listening to the sounds, the sounds of safety.

A white sandking watched him from atop the dresser in his bedroom, its antennae moving faintly.

They were making modifications in his house, burrowing into or out of his walls, carving things.

He went outside to get the bodies that had been rotting in the yard, hoping to appease the white maw’s hunger.

They avoided the frozen food, leaving it to thaw in a great puddle, but they carried off everything else.

He closed the door behind his latest guest, ignoring the startled exclamations that soon turned into shrill gibbering, and sprinted for the skimmer the man had arrived in.

Kress rose, holding his breath, not daring to hope.

He ran down the stairs, jumping over sandkings.

Finally he got out and checked, expecting the worst.

Kress went to his communicator again, stepping on a sandking in his haste, and prayed fervently that the device still worked.

The fear was on him again, filling him, and with it a great thirst and a terrible hunger.

He ran down the hill toward the house, waving his arms and shouting to the inhabitants.

The Moment Of Avoidance

Faber and Faber, 1970. Click for a better jpeg.

"Beautiful women with corrupt natures -- they have always been my life's target. There must be bleakness as well as loveliness in their gaze: only then can I expect the mingled moment."

-- Brian W. Aldiss, "The Moment of Eclipse." (1969)

Aldiss: the frustrator of expectation. Some of his work I respect, but some of it makes me want to bash my head against the kitchen sink. This mingled moment comes through most clearly in the story at hand.

Here we have a marvelous control of tone, melody and rhythm, imagery and symbol, but a narrative that collapses with a ffffffffffwuffffffff like a neglected balloon.

Any story makes a promise, and a good one keeps it. Aldiss implies a tale of perversion and danger, but as the story goes on, he avoids both. The narrator's "corrupt woman" is neither especially corrupt nor threatening, and he somehow manages to veer away from her at every possible encounter:

"It may appear as anti-climax if I admit that I now forgot about Christiania, the whole reason for my being in that place and on that continent. Nevertheless, I did forget her; our de­sires, particularly the desires of creative artists, are peripatetic: they submerge themselves sometimes unexpectedly and we never know where they may appear again. My imp of the perverse descended. For me the demolished bridge was never rebuilt."

Okay. Sure.

Instead of the story promised, Aldiss has another tale in mind. He supports it with recurring symbols (eyes and eclipses), then brings it to a crisis well-described and eerie. But once that mood has been established, the ending goes fffffffwuffffffff.

In effect, he does this:

"I'm crushed by a terrible spiritual burden!"

"Here, let me solve it for you."

"Okay. Sure."

The End.

What we have, then, is "The Moment of Avoidance," and this refusal to confront its own initial set-up is the most perverse thing about it. None of its fine prose, none of its otherwise firm technique, can salvage the story that Aldiss failed to write.