Month: October 2002

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Autograph copy of the Piano Trio in D-Major, op. 70 no. 1, by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Currently in the Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City.

There is a scene in the film Amadeus where Mozart’s wife, Constanze, in a fit of some desperation takes a portfolio of her husband’s musical works to Antonio Salieri, the court composer for Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. She does this because they are in dire need of money, but Mozart is too proud to present his works to the musical “authorities” as is required for certain types of employment. Salieri glances through them and asks if he can keep them, thinking that they are copies. Constanze replies, “Well, he’ll miss them. You see, they are originals.” Salieri’s eyes widen as he looks again at the works in the portfolio: page upon page of handwritten, original music, perfectly laid out in a hand neater than that of some copyists, such that the music could be performed on the spot if need be. As Salieri whispers in his voice-over narration, “It was as if he had been merely taking dictation from God.”

How interesting, then, to compare that image — Mozart’s music, perfectly conceived and written on the page with not a note out of place — with a page of manuscript in Beethoven’s hand: Beethoven, who may be the most famous musical figure of all time and the greatest of all classical composers. For Beethoven there was no direct link to the divine; music did not pour from him, already complete and perfect. Beethoven had to experiment. He had to test musical ideas. He had to sketch them out. If Beethoven realized that his music had gone awry, he would heavily scratch out the offending passage and continue composing on the same page. It fits in with the image we have of Beethoven: the tortured soul on the leading edge of Romanticism, trying to defy his growing deafness, conducting his epochal Symphony No. 9 and having to be physically turned toward the audience to see that they were applauding, tearing off the cover of his Symphony No. 3 in rage upon learning that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor, amakening from his death-coma just long enough to shake his fist at the heavens before succumbing in the end.

How miraculous Beethoven’s music seems, in the face of such struggle merely to create it.

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For some reason, I’ve been getting a ton of hits lately for people searching Google for explanations of Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee”. If any of these searchers are college students looking for an easy out on a homework assignment, well, I should say a couple of things:

:: I am a voracious reader who doesn’t read enough poetry, which is why I do the “Poetical Excursions”. The thoughts that I post there are fairly immediate impressions of a poem that I read (although, in the case of “Annabel Lee”, I’d been nursing those thoughts literally for years). I am a lover of the written word and the English language, but those two things do not a scholar make. Do not assume that what I do here poses for scholarship, please oh please.

:: One person actually found me using the words “Cliff notes” in his search terms. The poems that I choose to write about aren’t especially difficult works, so I suspect that people searching for that reason might be better served by actually reading the poems and doing their own thinking. Despite what some more brutish teachers of English may convey, the reading and consideration of poetry should be a pleasure, not a pill to be taken before bedtime.

:: Anyone who has any aspirations of being a fiction writer at all should read novels and stories to learn what storytelling is all about. That seems fairly obvious. Less obvious is that anyone who has any aspirations toward writing at all should read poetry — to learn what the English language is capable of doing.

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Weird Convergences:

Sometimes in the course of my weekly TV viewing, I will notice an odd bit of coincidence involving a guest star on a show, or even a bit player in the background. A case in point happened on this week’s episode of NYPDBlue, in which Detectives Jones and Medavoy arrive at a murder scene outside a small market run by an Asian-American man. I probably wouldn’t have taken any notice of this Asian-American store owner, except for the fact that this actor also appeared in last year’s season finale of The West Wing — in which he played an Asian-American store owner. It was the store where the Secret Service agent played by Mark Harmon was gunned down when he walked into an armed robbery. So, I end up wondering if it’s not just the same actor, but maybe even the same store owner, and I’m thinking, “Man, that guy’s seen a lot of violence in and around his store lately.”

(I believe that this is evidence of my recent increase in my caffeine intake.)

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I’ve joined another community blog, SportsFilter. It’s just what the name implies, a grab-bag of sports-related posts and Web-stuff. My first post was a link to this Slate article that is rather harshly critical of college football. Last time I checked, the SportsFilter denizens were giving the article a pretty decent roasting. I’m glad I didn’t write it….

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Hooray and huzzah! A problem of structure for the next chapter in The Welcomer (a.k.a. “The Novel-In-Progress”, “My Current Effort”, and “The Damned Thing”) finally resolved itself last night. I’ve been stewing over this for a couple of weeks now. The problem in question whose solution I finally realized was of sufficient annoyance that I was giving serious consideration to omitting the chapter entirely, although I believe the information it contains is really essential to the climax of the story. It’s always exciting to overcome a bump in the road.

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Steven Den Beste has written an interesting article about how he decides to write about some matters and not about others. It’s got me thinking about my own such process.

SDB notes that he often receives e-mails from regular readers of his site who have come across something online or have discovered some issue, and they want to hear his personal take on that subject. (I confess, I did send him an e-mail once, pointing out something that I thought might engage him, but he didn’t write about it. I chalked it up to the large number of requests he probably receives, given that his is a fairly high-traffic site, and that he probably didn’t find the item I’d sent him particularly compelling.) He offers one particularly telling sentence as to why he writes about the things he does, and why he does not write about the things he does not:

“I don’t pick what I write about, it picks me.”

I found that fascinating, because it’s the same for me. And not just here on Byzantium’s Shores, but — and this may be more important — for me as a fiction writer.

I am told that a question that nearly all writers get is, “Where do you get your ideas from, anyway?” (Maybe when I’m actually successful someone will ask me that….) My experience is quite a bit like the process that SDB describes in his article: I will happen upon some small thing, maybe an image or an event in everyday life, and a story will spontaneously appear in my mind. I don’t sit down and say, “Today I think I will write a ghost story in the M.R. James vein.” It’s not something that can be turned on or off. Instead, the story will find me — it will actually present itself, or at least a fairly representative portion of itself, to me and I will write it. The metaphor that Stephen King uses in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is that stories are fossils, and as writers we are the paleontologists whose job it is to extricate the fossil from the ground. Keeping the metaphor, a writer’s craft isn’t taking a blob of clay and shaping it into a dinosaur skeleton, but rather getting that dinosaur skeleton — already intact and complete — out of the ground without, say, snapping the shin-bone in two or crushing the skull. So when I reach a point in a story where I realize I’ve made a wrong turn somewhere, that the story in its current state is not going to work (or even be finishable), I’m like the paleontologist who realizes that further prying on the skeleton from this particular angle with this particular tool is going to cause the thing to break down the middle.

So I don’t think that I “create” my stories; instead, they find me and demand that I tell them. The ways that stories have presented themselves to me in the past are interesting. (At least, I like to think that they are.) Here are a few:

:: Once while browsing in the library, I opened some book and a slip of paper fell out. When I picked it up, I saw that it was just one of those little slips that libraries provide for writing down call numbers; some patron had been looking for this book and left their little call-number slip inside it. Nevertheless, I wondered: “What if this slip was actually a letter from someone who died mysteriously many years ago?”

:: I’ve been a big fan of Gary Larsen’s The Far Side for years. In one installment, a man stranded on a desert island has just rubbed Aladdin’s lamp. (How he got it is a mystery….) The Genie is standing there, looking annoyed, while the man rubs his chin and says, “Let’s see….I’ve got rhythm, and I’ve got music….how could I ask for anything more?” I liked the idea of a lamp with a Genie inside coming into the possession of a man who already has his heart’s desire, and I wrote the story.

:: My most ghoulish story came about from my connection of the fact that the Nazis conducted terrible experiments on humans in the concentration camps with the fact that the Nazis were also bizarrely interested in the occult.

:: There’s a wonderful episode of The Simpsons where Springfield adopts Prohibition and later abandons it. The episode ends with Homer Simpson saying, “To alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, life’s problems.” So now I’m writing a story where alcohol is really the solution to a town’s problems. (Or maybe it isn’t; I’m deliberately hedging on the moral POV in this story.)

:: My novel-in-progress is an Arthurian story, which I decided to write when I realized that many authors have treated the “once” part of “the once and future King”, but not very many have tackled the “future” part. (It’s a two-part work called The Promised King, of which I am nearly finished with the first part, called The Welcomer.)

These are just a few of the stories that have chosen me, out of the infinite possible ones that did not choose me. “Write what you know” is an oft-quoted rule, but it doesn’t work very well for me, as it leads me to seeking out the stories instead of allowing them to find me. I don’t write all of the stories that knock on my door or whisper in my ear at night. There isn’t enough time to get to them all, they’re not all equally compelling, and they don’t present themselves to me exclusively. (One idea I’ve been considering for a few months actually shows up in the current issue of Realms of Fantasy, and it’s executed beautifully by its author, so I don’t know if I will ever tackle that one.) It occurs to me, also, that perhaps the lengthy period of rejection that all writers endure (and which I whined wrote about a few weeks back) is something of an audition period, but not in the usual sense where I’m continually auditioning for editors and first-readers. Maybe I’m continually auditioning for the stories. Maybe all the good stories are gathered somewhere, in some Platonic realm, watching me write and saying amongst themselves, “So, should one of us go let him write us yet?”

I like that image. So, maybe I’ll indulge it for a while, and see my daily efforts as my way of putting out the welcome mat and seeing what comes knocking.

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BARRY BONDS IS IN THE WORLD SERIES!!!

I don’t think that Carl Lewis could have outrun Barry Bonds last night, when Bonds led the charge from the dugout onto the field last night after his San Francisco Giants scored the winning run in the bottom of the ninth to win the National League pennant. It’s wonderful moments like that — watching Bonds finally go to the World Series — that challenge my cynicism toward Major League Baseball. For one moment last night I was able to forget my fear that baseball will say, “See, this season proves that the small-market teams are able to compete just fine,” and that a team that was almost eliminated altogether nearly won the American League pennant, and that baseball’s economics have reached a point that one of the richest teams, the Atlanta Braves, could be on the verge of a small fire-sale. For one moment there was only the game’s best player, a player who is surely one of the greatest to ever play the game, basking in the joy of attaining a goal that has eluded him through his entire career. Baseball is a game of moments, and this one was wonderful. I only hope that baseball heeds one of the many bits of wisdom from the classic film Bull Durham:

Nuke: Why can’t you just let me enjoy the moment?

Crash: The moment’s over.

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I’ve been on a weight-loss regimen since the beginning of 2002, combining regular exercise with healthy eating. (None of that goofy “Eat nothing but protein” stuff for me, thank you very much!) I’m happy to report that I’ve had success with the regimen, which I consider a shift in lifestyle as opposed to “a diet”. I’ve reduced by BMI five points so far, with more to come.

(But just to demonstrate that BMI is a guideline but not a perfect indicator of reality, on a lark I plugged in Bruce Smith’s height and weight into the calculator linked above — and he’s got the same BMI as me, right now. Now, if Bruce Smith’s total body fat can even be measured in pounds, I’d be surprised — but a strict reading of his BMI, without regard to his body-type, says that he is “obese”. Just a little food for thought….but hey, I’ve got something in common with Bruce Smith!)

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Baseball playoffs, an NFL season starting to take shape and develop its storylines, leaf-peeping, a pumpkin on every doorstep….is there any question that October is the best month of the year?

Anyway, time for my Monday sporting thoughts, in no particular order….

:: I love watching Travis Henry run the football. He’s not a “squirming” type of running back, like Thurman Thomas or Barry Sanders were. When those guys broke tackles, it was by some kind of weird contorting process that reminds me of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. When Henry breaks a tackle, though, I’m more reminded of Emmitt Smith in the way he simply keeps his powerful legs churning forward all the time, and he has an amazing sense of balance. Henry is only going to get better as the Bills’ young offensive line improves, which it’s doing already.

:: However, I have to wonder: what on Earth ever happened to cradling the ball close to your body as you run? Henry’s biggest problem is that he fumbles a lot. He’s fumbled in every game this year, and it’s because he insists on holding the ball at arm’s length, windmilling both arms as he runs. This makes for a schizophrenic experience, watching him run: “There he goes! He’s through the hole, wow, what a back….OHMYGOD, hold on to the ball!!!!”

:: Another game, another doughnut to pencil into the “Turnovers forced” column for the Bills. When you can’t even force an expansion team to turn the ball over, even when that expansion team is starting a rookie at quarterback, you know your defense is in some serious trouble later on….

:: ….with “later on” being next week, when the Bills travel to Miami to play the Dolphins, who I think are the best team in the AFC right now. Buffalo-Miami is one of the better rivalries in the NFL, and right now the pendulum is definitely on the “Miami” side of the clock. I don’t see the Bills winning this one.

:: The Vikings are finally in the “win” column, along with the Rams. Hooray. Too bad it took losing Kurt Warner for two months before Mike Martz decided to rely on the best back in football.

:: The Steelers are now on track for the AFC Championship! They blew out the Bengals, and not just anybody can blow out the Bengals. Start paving the road to the Super Bowl, because the Bus is on it! (Oh wait, anybody can blow out the Bengals….)

:: Before the season began, I read some sportswriter’s comment to the effect of “Sure, Patriots fans are in love with Tom Brady now, but wait until he has his first three-interception game while Drew Bledsoe is setting passing records for the Bills.” I can’t remember who said that, but it came to pass yesterday. It’s funny how it took NFL teams three years to figure out how to beat Kurt Warner: give him pressure, bump his receivers so the timing routes are screwed up, upset his rhythm, and watch him come back down to earth. It’s taken teams under a year to figure out that maybe the same theory could work on Tom Brady. Now that the Patriots are in second-place by a couple of games, they will again have to rely on the late-season swoon by the Dolphins if they want to capture the division. The bad news for the Pats (and the good news for people like myself, who don’t like the Pats) is that if there has ever been a year when the Dolphins are unlikely to fall apart in December, this is that year.

:: It looks like the Chargers are for real. The AFC West is a hell of a division.

:: I love gonzo sports statistics. In yesterday’s game against the Saints, Washington’s first scoring drive covered 75 yards — 36 yards more than New Orleans’ first four scoring drives combined.

:: The Anaheim Angels are in the World Series. I was pulling for the Twins, but….well, the Angels are one of those teams that has been down-on-its-luck for years. This is a team that was one strike away from going to the World Series the last time they made the postseason, in 1986 — only to have their closer, Donnie Moore, surrender a two-run homer that eventually propelled the Red Sox to the Series against the Mets. In 1992, a character on Seinfeld observed that with all of those planes carrying major league baseball teams all over the country every year, there has never been a crash — and then the Angels’ bus crashed, injuring a bunch of players. And it goes on. This franchise deserves a pennant, and I’m glad they got one. (Although, if they end up facing the Giants, I’ll be rooting for them and not the Angels. It’s a Bonds thing, you know….)

:: The NHL’s seven-month, eighty-game preseason has started, in anticipation of the two-month regular season (which they paradoxically call “the playoffs”). The Buffalo Sabres are off to a thrilling start! I’m not much of a hockey fan; I root for the Sabres out of loyalty to All Things Buffalo, and when they are eliminated I stop paying attention to hockey altogether. Anyhoo, go Sabres!

:: I don’t know if this qualifies as sport, but….let’s hear it for the new champion of speed crochet!!!

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I have added a couple of new blogs under “Other Journeys”, at left. I have also added a new section, called “Other Voices Around the Fire”, denoting community blogs. Currently I am linking Metafilter (of which I am a lurker) and Collaboratory (of which I am a participant).

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