It’s not possible to turn on a television or computer anymore without learning that someone meant to construct or enforce laws – be they from man or faith – has broken them. It’s an example of greed, usually; other times the corruption of the soul by power. The victim feels abused, belittled, and perhaps eternally vulnerable. There’s also a sense of betrayal, knowledge that one's fellow man is able and willing to hurt another, sometimes for as little reason as feeling superior for a few scant moments.
For the rest of us, we see just how much laws protect us. Our laws define our society, give checks and balances to those in power, and are only as strong as the determination of those who enforce them. Otherwise, they’re worth less than the paper they’re written on. Every time an official breaks the law, we’re reminded of how much protection a sheet of parchment provides from attack.
Yet The Law holds power. The Law breaks the wicked and ruins their empires. The Law shields the innocent and empowers the just. And yet it seems like more and more, all the law does is give a name for the ways people screw each other over.
If that weren’t the case, what would happen? Would someone that stole from another find their own property missing? Could someone abuse their child only to discover their own body broken? It sounds great at first, but when one follows that line of thought more, it gets muddier. Crossing the street in the middle of the block to catch up with your runaway dog? Forget it. Skip turning in that rental DVD by one day? Maybe you’ll be just as late to that interview for your dream job. Sure, a lot of criminal activity and malicious behavior goes missing, but so does free will.
So there needs to be a happy medium. A force that will respond whenever called to whoever calls it, under any circumstances. Something beyond interference, that doesn’t pay heed to gender, race, social status, age. At the same time, it would need to be completely reactive. It could be aware of what a person is doing, but unless someone directly requests action be taken (and specifies what actions need to be taken), our hypothetical Law would do nothing. The onus would be on everyone tied to this Law to know when the Law needs to be involved, how to involve it, and be responsible for the consequences. This Law is not justice in and of itself, but it is a set of tools that anyone should be able to use to make sure people behave in a way that everyone can tolerate.
This “happy medium” Law is an idea millennia old, further away than a matter transporter yet something kept very close. Harry Potter learned exactly what such Law could give people, and watched others use this Law to take as much away from those he cared for. Gandalf gave his life to enforce the Law, and the Law gave it back to him to bring those who had abused it down. Merlin tried to teach his Laws to his fellow men, and though they could not use it like him, he taught them to enforce its spirit. This Law isn’t beyond abuse, it’s simply beyond corruption. Those who would twist it to their own ends cannot bend or rewrite it, nor can they block anyone else from using it themselves. It would not stop bad things from happening, but it is a source of power independent of physical strength or material wealth and influence.
It has given life to an entire genre of fiction, one that has grown along with societies, mirroring the complexity of their laws with its own.
Rules with the power to enforce themselves, that leave it to the people to say when they’re enforced. That sounds Magical to me.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
Resolutions and their Proper Avoidance
SPOILER WARNING: I talk about the endings of plays over 400 years old. Odds are readers won’t be spoiled anything, but just in case…
I was watching Charlie Rose the other day, interviewing the director of the RSC Michael Boyd. The topic was the recent set-up in New York for a run of a number of http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifShakespeare plays to be performed by the company there, including a production of Hamlet for inner city youths. Early results seem very positive, and this is the kind of thing I’d like to see continue and spread – one of the biggest misconceptions about Shakespeare is that it’s incomprehensible without either a college degree or a monocle.
Rose asked Boyd what he thought made Shakespeare endure as well as it has, and his answer’s been running around my head for a few days. He said (to paraphrase) that Shakespeare knew how to close a story without resolving anything. Taking Hamlet as an example, the play’s named for the boy, he succeeds in killing his enemy at the end, so on the surface everything’s wrapped up nice and neat, but if you take a deeper look at what’s going on, the big picture is still blurry. By the end of the play, the country’s torn itself apart in civil war, the entire royal family is dead, and Hamlet’s more concerned about how it’ll sound in history than who will succeed him.
I thought back to what I remember and realized Shakespeare does this a lot. In Romeo & Juliet, the families keep the feud going even after their kids kill themselves. Toward the end of Twelfth Night, one character is swearing revenge on everyone, the only response sending a messenger with a request for peace. Othello: Iago manages to tear apart his own nation’s army and destroy the lives of a happy couple, and he is one of the few main characters to survive through the play.
Boyd goes on to explain that with every story, the temptation exists to tie up all the loose ends, and give the audience a clear indication of what the creator wanted the audience to take from the story. This exists in teaching as well – a teacher can tell students what they need to know in a certain subject and have done with it. They’ve said their piece, the audience will either take it as their own or leave it. But the best teachers orchestrate ways for the students to figure the critical things out for themselves. The effective teacher will lecture like normal, but instead of the whole of the lesson they’ll just give pieces – breadcrumbs – for students to pick up, and every now and then the teacher’ll stop lecturing and see which student has followed the breadcrumbs and can tell where the class is heading. This is a far less certain method – it depends as much on the audience’s energy and attention level as anything – but when it pays off, the lesson sticks with the audience forever. Even through finals week.
This also reminds me of the idea of a writer’s “contract with the audience,” the idea of a creator’s obligation to the people for whom they create. To put it another way, a writer will put hundreds or thousands of hours into a novel, estrange friends, family, health, hygiene, so when they finish they have every right to expect an appreciative, paying audience; an audience member has only so much time and money for themselves, the rest spent working hard to survive, so when they do spend time and money on a novel, they have every right to expect something they’ll understand and enjoy. How much can the writer explore their art and play with their audience before the audience moves on to something they can absorb easier? A tricky equation to solve.
Personally, I enjoyed the lack of resolution Shakespeare employed because it helped give each play a sense of continuity, that it was one segment out of a much richer environment that we were seeing as an audience. We’d watch characters grow and change, perhaps die, and by the end they had stopped being the people we met before, and the background had changed just as much. Both were ready to change and grown even more, but the audience wasn’t going to see it. It gave them lives – it gave them life – outside the story.
And I liked that.
I was watching Charlie Rose the other day, interviewing the director of the RSC Michael Boyd. The topic was the recent set-up in New York for a run of a number of http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifShakespeare plays to be performed by the company there, including a production of Hamlet for inner city youths. Early results seem very positive, and this is the kind of thing I’d like to see continue and spread – one of the biggest misconceptions about Shakespeare is that it’s incomprehensible without either a college degree or a monocle.
Rose asked Boyd what he thought made Shakespeare endure as well as it has, and his answer’s been running around my head for a few days. He said (to paraphrase) that Shakespeare knew how to close a story without resolving anything. Taking Hamlet as an example, the play’s named for the boy, he succeeds in killing his enemy at the end, so on the surface everything’s wrapped up nice and neat, but if you take a deeper look at what’s going on, the big picture is still blurry. By the end of the play, the country’s torn itself apart in civil war, the entire royal family is dead, and Hamlet’s more concerned about how it’ll sound in history than who will succeed him.
I thought back to what I remember and realized Shakespeare does this a lot. In Romeo & Juliet, the families keep the feud going even after their kids kill themselves. Toward the end of Twelfth Night, one character is swearing revenge on everyone, the only response sending a messenger with a request for peace. Othello: Iago manages to tear apart his own nation’s army and destroy the lives of a happy couple, and he is one of the few main characters to survive through the play.
Boyd goes on to explain that with every story, the temptation exists to tie up all the loose ends, and give the audience a clear indication of what the creator wanted the audience to take from the story. This exists in teaching as well – a teacher can tell students what they need to know in a certain subject and have done with it. They’ve said their piece, the audience will either take it as their own or leave it. But the best teachers orchestrate ways for the students to figure the critical things out for themselves. The effective teacher will lecture like normal, but instead of the whole of the lesson they’ll just give pieces – breadcrumbs – for students to pick up, and every now and then the teacher’ll stop lecturing and see which student has followed the breadcrumbs and can tell where the class is heading. This is a far less certain method – it depends as much on the audience’s energy and attention level as anything – but when it pays off, the lesson sticks with the audience forever. Even through finals week.
This also reminds me of the idea of a writer’s “contract with the audience,” the idea of a creator’s obligation to the people for whom they create. To put it another way, a writer will put hundreds or thousands of hours into a novel, estrange friends, family, health, hygiene, so when they finish they have every right to expect an appreciative, paying audience; an audience member has only so much time and money for themselves, the rest spent working hard to survive, so when they do spend time and money on a novel, they have every right to expect something they’ll understand and enjoy. How much can the writer explore their art and play with their audience before the audience moves on to something they can absorb easier? A tricky equation to solve.
Personally, I enjoyed the lack of resolution Shakespeare employed because it helped give each play a sense of continuity, that it was one segment out of a much richer environment that we were seeing as an audience. We’d watch characters grow and change, perhaps die, and by the end they had stopped being the people we met before, and the background had changed just as much. Both were ready to change and grown even more, but the audience wasn’t going to see it. It gave them lives – it gave them life – outside the story.
And I liked that.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Catching Up
REALLY?! January? What the hell?
Okay, this is where I should promise never to let a lapse like that happen again, dedicate myself for more faithful blogging, and leave it at that, right? Well, screw that. I came here to blog.
One of the exercises I ran for this past semester's class (everyone passed!) was something I'm calling Thread Pulling. Take one thread of a story, be it a plot thread, character thread, anything that's consistently present but changes from beginning to end, and yank it out; isolate that thread's actions in the story. The story we used was the movie Chinatown, and students built these threads in an effort to understand everything that was happening in this very dense film. We ended up with six threads, each of the pretty long and complicated.
Over the past few days, I've tried adapting this technique to my novel project, isolating the main characters and figuring out what the story is from just their perspective. I've finished only two threads so far, but it's filled in a LOT of questions I hadn't even bothered asking about the beast yet. By the time I finish the threads, I hope to have a much better understanding of what my end product will look like.
The next phase of the student project was to re-weave their threads into a single swatch of story, with the ultimate goal of reworking it into a piece of prose. This mostly involved putting each thread side by side and connecting them where we could. Sometimes it was easy, two characters talking at a table links their stories just about automatically. Others were trickier - sometimes a character will be alone in the middle of a riverbed, but what they find or learn there triggers something in another thread, so a link needs to be established. It was a painful assignment in some ways, but by the end of it they knew this story so well, adapting it into a novel was almost a relief.
Visually, this is hard to pull off simply because it can take up a lot of room, and technology doesn't necessarily help for the limits screen size can create. Once I get it done, though, each moment and each connection I visualize will be something to write for the novel. These kinds of headaches I can look forward to.
Okay, this is where I should promise never to let a lapse like that happen again, dedicate myself for more faithful blogging, and leave it at that, right? Well, screw that. I came here to blog.
One of the exercises I ran for this past semester's class (everyone passed!) was something I'm calling Thread Pulling. Take one thread of a story, be it a plot thread, character thread, anything that's consistently present but changes from beginning to end, and yank it out; isolate that thread's actions in the story. The story we used was the movie Chinatown, and students built these threads in an effort to understand everything that was happening in this very dense film. We ended up with six threads, each of the pretty long and complicated.
Over the past few days, I've tried adapting this technique to my novel project, isolating the main characters and figuring out what the story is from just their perspective. I've finished only two threads so far, but it's filled in a LOT of questions I hadn't even bothered asking about the beast yet. By the time I finish the threads, I hope to have a much better understanding of what my end product will look like.
The next phase of the student project was to re-weave their threads into a single swatch of story, with the ultimate goal of reworking it into a piece of prose. This mostly involved putting each thread side by side and connecting them where we could. Sometimes it was easy, two characters talking at a table links their stories just about automatically. Others were trickier - sometimes a character will be alone in the middle of a riverbed, but what they find or learn there triggers something in another thread, so a link needs to be established. It was a painful assignment in some ways, but by the end of it they knew this story so well, adapting it into a novel was almost a relief.
Visually, this is hard to pull off simply because it can take up a lot of room, and technology doesn't necessarily help for the limits screen size can create. Once I get it done, though, each moment and each connection I visualize will be something to write for the novel. These kinds of headaches I can look forward to.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
The Crash
I am currently experiencing what is well known, if not popularly called, The Crash. Visiting family is gone back to their homes, traveling's done, and it's the first time the body has a chance to cope with all the stress it's put up with recently. I feel like I could sleep for days, I'd like another week to really get my shit together and be ready to go back to work, but there's zero chance of that happening. in 24 hours I'll be in the mail room again, wondering how many more packages I can sort before I give myself an aneurysm and have an excuse for a break.
I take Crashes seriously. When I Crash, I take it easy, I don't push myself, and I let whatever reserves are gone get replenished. I know plenty of people that don't. They pride themselves on how they can just push past it, ride their own momentum, and get through it; good for them. Me, it doesn't work like that. I can push through Crashes as well as the next guy, but I also know that if I do, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get sick. Crashes may be a hassle, but I can deal with hassles, but I spent enough of my life laid up in a sickbed to not want to be there if I can possibly avoid it. Even if that means not staying up late for a week in a row.
My first semester as a college professor is done, and I think it went pretty well. I won't have my evaluations back until later this month, but all my students passed, I had fun (so what if the students did), and nothing went horribly wrong. I'm teaching another class this coming semester, one that plays a little closer to my strengths, so we'll see if I can keep that momentum going for a whole semester.
My writing... has slowed. Not stopped, and I suppose that's its own victory, but I wanted to have more done by now. A full time job plus a part time teaching job equals a much larger strain on my reserves than I estimated. It was the right call and I'm happier for it, but this is not a long-term thing. I'm meeting with people and am trying to change some habits to get back on top of things, my writing and fitness being the two big things, but it's going to come down to willpower. We'll see.
Happy New Year!
I take Crashes seriously. When I Crash, I take it easy, I don't push myself, and I let whatever reserves are gone get replenished. I know plenty of people that don't. They pride themselves on how they can just push past it, ride their own momentum, and get through it; good for them. Me, it doesn't work like that. I can push through Crashes as well as the next guy, but I also know that if I do, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get sick. Crashes may be a hassle, but I can deal with hassles, but I spent enough of my life laid up in a sickbed to not want to be there if I can possibly avoid it. Even if that means not staying up late for a week in a row.
My first semester as a college professor is done, and I think it went pretty well. I won't have my evaluations back until later this month, but all my students passed, I had fun (so what if the students did), and nothing went horribly wrong. I'm teaching another class this coming semester, one that plays a little closer to my strengths, so we'll see if I can keep that momentum going for a whole semester.
My writing... has slowed. Not stopped, and I suppose that's its own victory, but I wanted to have more done by now. A full time job plus a part time teaching job equals a much larger strain on my reserves than I estimated. It was the right call and I'm happier for it, but this is not a long-term thing. I'm meeting with people and am trying to change some habits to get back on top of things, my writing and fitness being the two big things, but it's going to come down to willpower. We'll see.
Happy New Year!
Thursday, July 29, 2010
For You: A Short Story
A friend of mine is testing out an iPad for work, and I was able to liberate it from her for about half an hour. The word processor it comes with is very VERY basic, so I kept my project simple. I didn't think much while writing it, but the friend was so happy when she got her iPad back that she sent me a copy of the story and suggested I post it here. So here you go - Enjoy!
The Roman Dead
The heat reflecting off the asphalt was enough to peel the bronze of the Collosus' crotch. The heat would have caught the thatch roofs on fire if the humidity would have allowed it, but instead the adhesive merely melted and exposed whatever hid inside the houses to the pounding rays of the sun. Among them huddled Portia and her two sons, Marcus and Gaius, all three sweating profusely before the sun had spent three hours in the sky.
Portia had watched her husband march of with the rest of the Roman legionnaires last week, and grew sick with worry when word would not come of their victory. When word did come, it was of the armies being overrun, and the blight's continuous progress toward Rome, and she was nearly mad with fright. Soothsayers declared that Apollo would give his people mercy and guide them to the River Styx before the horde could claim them, and watching her neighbors collapse under the sun maddened Portia, for she could not discern why her own sacrifices had been ignored by the son god. By the time the Undead arrived and began feasting on what survivors risked being outside, Portia had gone so mad that, when compared to the calamities that surrounded her and her family, she acted perfectly sane.
Marcus squirmed as another tuft of thatch slid off the roof and exposed another area of floor to sunlight. Portia didn't know what the boy wanted to do in response, it wasn't as if the monsters outside cared about the state of the lands they were conquering, only the state of their "prisoners." Perhaps that is why the legions had proved so helpless against them, she supposed; every enemy they'd faced before had wanted Rome, be it for its fertile lands or prodigal architecture or tomes of wisdom or the peerless beauty of its women, and for this they were predictable. The horde outside only wanted food, and was oblivious to the uniforms that food wore. Rome could outsmart just about any foe, but against such mindlessness there was no defense, except perhaps Portia's, if only she could keep young Marcus and Gaius still.
For four days the Undead scourged their land, and for all that time Portia and hers had hidden still as the Parthenon, hoping to wait them out. Where the horde had invulnerability they still had to work, still had to search, and for that they might tire before finding them - it was small chance, but more than the Caesars had apparently. The stench outside was killing whatever appetite they might have had, and they'd more or less gotten used to the moans, but thirst was breaking them apart. Portia was checking her arms for veins she could open so that her sons might have some moisture to sustain themselves when a new sound assaulted them and gave her new plan pause.
From outside could be heard a hundred clumsy butchers and prophets dropping their entrails on the floor. The soothsayers may have told truly that Apollo meant to assault the lands, but as to His purpose they were in grievous error, for in the oppressive and constant heat, the flesh of the Undead could not hold and sloshed off the bone. Portia heard the pounding of wet meat onto the dirt, then of bone without the means to support itself, and it was only after an hour's silence did she then risk a look through the window. Surely, what she saw she could only call a miracle, and did with what strength remained took a pail to the nearest well for water. Though a few Undead remained mobile, this mobility was so reduced that, after enduring their threat for so long Portia found herself laughing among them.
The Roman Dead
The heat reflecting off the asphalt was enough to peel the bronze of the Collosus' crotch. The heat would have caught the thatch roofs on fire if the humidity would have allowed it, but instead the adhesive merely melted and exposed whatever hid inside the houses to the pounding rays of the sun. Among them huddled Portia and her two sons, Marcus and Gaius, all three sweating profusely before the sun had spent three hours in the sky.
Portia had watched her husband march of with the rest of the Roman legionnaires last week, and grew sick with worry when word would not come of their victory. When word did come, it was of the armies being overrun, and the blight's continuous progress toward Rome, and she was nearly mad with fright. Soothsayers declared that Apollo would give his people mercy and guide them to the River Styx before the horde could claim them, and watching her neighbors collapse under the sun maddened Portia, for she could not discern why her own sacrifices had been ignored by the son god. By the time the Undead arrived and began feasting on what survivors risked being outside, Portia had gone so mad that, when compared to the calamities that surrounded her and her family, she acted perfectly sane.
Marcus squirmed as another tuft of thatch slid off the roof and exposed another area of floor to sunlight. Portia didn't know what the boy wanted to do in response, it wasn't as if the monsters outside cared about the state of the lands they were conquering, only the state of their "prisoners." Perhaps that is why the legions had proved so helpless against them, she supposed; every enemy they'd faced before had wanted Rome, be it for its fertile lands or prodigal architecture or tomes of wisdom or the peerless beauty of its women, and for this they were predictable. The horde outside only wanted food, and was oblivious to the uniforms that food wore. Rome could outsmart just about any foe, but against such mindlessness there was no defense, except perhaps Portia's, if only she could keep young Marcus and Gaius still.
For four days the Undead scourged their land, and for all that time Portia and hers had hidden still as the Parthenon, hoping to wait them out. Where the horde had invulnerability they still had to work, still had to search, and for that they might tire before finding them - it was small chance, but more than the Caesars had apparently. The stench outside was killing whatever appetite they might have had, and they'd more or less gotten used to the moans, but thirst was breaking them apart. Portia was checking her arms for veins she could open so that her sons might have some moisture to sustain themselves when a new sound assaulted them and gave her new plan pause.
From outside could be heard a hundred clumsy butchers and prophets dropping their entrails on the floor. The soothsayers may have told truly that Apollo meant to assault the lands, but as to His purpose they were in grievous error, for in the oppressive and constant heat, the flesh of the Undead could not hold and sloshed off the bone. Portia heard the pounding of wet meat onto the dirt, then of bone without the means to support itself, and it was only after an hour's silence did she then risk a look through the window. Surely, what she saw she could only call a miracle, and did with what strength remained took a pail to the nearest well for water. Though a few Undead remained mobile, this mobility was so reduced that, after enduring their threat for so long Portia found herself laughing among them.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
The More Things Act Like They Change
After fits and starts, my contract with Butler is signed and I am officially going to teach in the fall. My main stressor with that development is getting all the material read and some notes taken before the class begins in earnest. I know I'm not going to have time to read it with the students, since I'm going to work full time in the Mail Center as well, but I figure if I've read it in the past year, that's good enough. I'm almost done with Dracula, which may be the densest book of the course.
It doesn't help that a friend of mine just got me hooked into the Dresden Files series. If you've never heard of it before, it's Sam Spade meets Harry Potter (to put it vulgarly) - Harry Dresden is the world's only practicing magician that advertises his services for private investigations, for $50/ hour plus expenses. The premise may not seem phenomenal, but the execution is very well done, it treats itself smartly without coming off as pretentious. It treats cliches well while adding twists where appropriate. Basically, it's fun reading that soaks up hours and days of your time, and when I didn't have many of them free to begin with, I can say freely that I hate my friends sometimes.
I've been focusing on my novel project (when my digestive system isn't invaded by legions of viral centurions), and I'm getting deep enough into it that I'm having to go back and forth in the story to set things up for later payoffs. As I do this, I find out more things about the world the characters live in that I have to go into other documents to record and explore, and then go back to the text and rewrite one scene or start another. It gives me a whole new respect for the people that do this full-time - there really is enough work to be done to constitute calling this full-time work.
Friends warned me against playing Final Fantasy 13 for various reasons. I won't go deep into my personal experiences, mostly because the game isn't worth the space. There was an essence the Final Fantasy games had, something that made you dump days and weeks into them without giving you the sense that you wasted your time. The gameplay may not have been extraordinary or the stories captivating in any special way, but it was enough that you felt you got a good return on your investment. Whatever that essence was, the series has lost it.
I'm going to visit my sister next week, and it's going to be awesome! She lives near a beach on the West Coast, so it'll be a cool bit of role-reversal from the time she visited me in Cornwall. Less Arthurian sightseeing, more boozeries!
It doesn't help that a friend of mine just got me hooked into the Dresden Files series. If you've never heard of it before, it's Sam Spade meets Harry Potter (to put it vulgarly) - Harry Dresden is the world's only practicing magician that advertises his services for private investigations, for $50/ hour plus expenses. The premise may not seem phenomenal, but the execution is very well done, it treats itself smartly without coming off as pretentious. It treats cliches well while adding twists where appropriate. Basically, it's fun reading that soaks up hours and days of your time, and when I didn't have many of them free to begin with, I can say freely that I hate my friends sometimes.
I've been focusing on my novel project (when my digestive system isn't invaded by legions of viral centurions), and I'm getting deep enough into it that I'm having to go back and forth in the story to set things up for later payoffs. As I do this, I find out more things about the world the characters live in that I have to go into other documents to record and explore, and then go back to the text and rewrite one scene or start another. It gives me a whole new respect for the people that do this full-time - there really is enough work to be done to constitute calling this full-time work.
Friends warned me against playing Final Fantasy 13 for various reasons. I won't go deep into my personal experiences, mostly because the game isn't worth the space. There was an essence the Final Fantasy games had, something that made you dump days and weeks into them without giving you the sense that you wasted your time. The gameplay may not have been extraordinary or the stories captivating in any special way, but it was enough that you felt you got a good return on your investment. Whatever that essence was, the series has lost it.
I'm going to visit my sister next week, and it's going to be awesome! She lives near a beach on the West Coast, so it'll be a cool bit of role-reversal from the time she visited me in Cornwall. Less Arthurian sightseeing, more boozeries!
Friday, June 11, 2010
Major Delinquency
Okay, so it's been a long while since I posted. I apologize, but I also really have to pee, so this won't be long.
The screenplay is done. It's in LA. At least one reader likes it. We'll see where it goes from here.
My section at Butler was approved and put on the books yesterday. Today it was filled up. No getting out of it now, I'm an adjunct. It should be fun!
The screenplay is done. It's in LA. At least one reader likes it. We'll see where it goes from here.
My section at Butler was approved and put on the books yesterday. Today it was filled up. No getting out of it now, I'm an adjunct. It should be fun!
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