This is in my workplace’s parking lot. I drive past this each and every day.
And if it has to bug me, well, now it’s damned well gonna bug you!
Rending of teeth! Gnashing of garments!
Tone Poem Tuesday
A contemporary work today, by Belize-born British composer Errollyn Wallen.Wallen’s family moved to London when she was just two, and it was there that she grew and matured into her professional life as a prolific composer and teacher.
Of this work, Wallen says:
Composing for the orchestra is my favourite challenge, [and this] work is an especially important one for me. It is an innate human instinct to be free, just as it is a low of nature that the river should rush headlong to the sea. That is the concept behind Mighty River.
Slavery claimed the lives of countless people, but somehow my ancestors found the grit and determination to persist in spite of the conditions in which they found themselves. I dedicate Mighty River to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Though I never kner her, I am driven on by her courage in the face of dreadful dods and am inspired by her example not merely to survive, but to thrive.
I first heard this piece the other day, and it’s quite amazing. This performance by the National Youth Orchestra is quite something, and I’m discovering a keen apprecation for the music-making that comes from youth orchestras and ensembles these days. What they sometimes lack in technical polish they often make up for in an ability to make accessibile to emotional heart of a work. I’m less and less drawn to the musical restraint of maturity as I get older.
Mighty River opens with a solo horn quoting “Amazing Grace”, and then as the rest of the orchestra joins in, the piece genuinely does settle into the kind of constant flowing motion that is suggestive of a river on its way to the sea. But throughout the piece, with all its rocking and flowing rhythms, bits and pieces of other spirituals are heard, including more quotes from “Amazing Grace”. The music takes several darker, more introspective turns, but somehow it always finds its way home to that rocking ostinato, and ultimately back to “Amazing Grace” before ending on a gentle major chord. One senses the constance of Black persistence and forced endurance mirroring against the constance of the river’s motion.
Here is Mighty River by Errollyn Wallen.
Share This Post
WNY Love Letter: The Dumas Bridge
First things first: it’s not a bridge. Also, I am quite literally the only person who calls it the Dumas Bridge.
Let’s back up.
One of my favorite locations for nature walks in my neck o’ the woods is Knox Farm State Park. This park is located in East Aurora, NY, and it constitutes the house, stables, farm buildings, and grounds of the old Knox Estate. The Knox family was, for a time, one of the richest families in the region (if not the richest family in the region). Seymour Knox was one of the founders of the famed Woolworth Company, the chain of five-and-dime stores that used to be prominent in American retail. Other members of the Knox family were high-ranking bank officers, and Seymour Knox III was the first owner of the Buffalo Sabres.
I honestly don’t know where the Knox Family has gone since then. There may still be Knox descendents in the area, but if there are, they don’t seem to be nearly as eminent in the community as they were “back in the day”. The family’s old country estate has since become a park, first a local park, and later part of New York’s State Park system.
Knox Farm is itself a wonderful place, with the feel of an old English estate: the main house still stands and before COVID was the site of many wonderful events, including a craft sale where I used to go Christmas shopping each year. But there are also the outlying woods, surrounding the estate, through which well-maintained trails run. Walking in the Knox Farm woods is always a peaceful return to nature, and while there’s enough variance in the topography to make different parts of the park feel differently from one another, it’s not at all a demanding place to walk, like some of the other local nature parks located in the hillier regions.
I’ll say more about Knox Farm in a future post, but for right now, I single out a single spot on one of its many trails:
It’s not so much a bridge as an earthen embankment build to allow transit over a narrow bog through which the higher meadows drain into the lower ones. A culvert runs beneath the “bridge” to allow flow, but it’s not like there’s a stream there, just a slow occasional flow of dampness. Instead of a drop on either side, like you might expect from a bridge, there’s a slope, so if you jumped you’d roll about six feet down on the northern side, and maybe ten feet on the southern side. The worst that might happen is a sprained ankle and you’d get muddy.
So no, it’s not much of a bridge. But it has wooden fenceposts on either side that are of particularly rustic construction, and between those posts, and the fact that the bridge is far away from any visible buildings on the estate, and the wooded path that approaches it with its gentle S-curve, the bridge seems to me to always feel like something from a much earlier age. In fact, for me it suggests something quite specific: this bridge looks like a location out of The Three Musketeers, which is why I call it the Dumas Bridge. Every time I am here, I imagine our heroes–Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan–galloping around the bend and over the bridge on their way to thwart some scheme of Milady de Winter or Cardinal Richelieu.
Or perhaps D’Artagnan and Constance meet by moonlight on the bridge, for a secret tryst. Or perhaps Milady’s agents meet on the bridge by torchlight to exchange secret information.
Who knows…but it’s nice to have an imagination that I can bring to bear on my walks in the woods. I could as well think of this place as the Alexander Bridge, imagining Taran and Eilonwy and Fflewdur Fflam crossing the bridge on one of their adventures. Or maybe there’s a place like this in The Shire, a place in the back woods that Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin pass as they make their way in secret to the Old Woods and Bree beyond whilst evading the mysterious Black Riders.
Or maybe young Aeric Seaflame finds a bridge like this on one of the back roads of Frobish Forest as he flees the agents of Lady Perris Winterborne…but to learn about that, you’ll have to wait until I finish writing the book in which those exploits take place.
For now, we’ll stick with Dumas.
All for one, and one for all!
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
For some reason I have Jim Croce on the mind, so here are two of my favorite songs of his. Both are sad songs about the endings of relationships. “Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels)” is the better known of the two. It’s one side of the conversation between someone who is pining for a lost love, and the operator on the other end of the phone line as the singer searches for that lost love. Why? Not to catch up with them or to learn about their new life and new relationship (with “my best old ex-friend Ray”), but from a standpoint of vengefulness. He just wants to show them that “I’ve overcome the blow, I’ve learned to take it well”…but in the very same breath, without even a pause, he admits that he wishes his words could convince himself. He sings all this in a kind of breathless rush; Croce was very good at using different melodies and even different rhythms to suggest complex meanings in his songs.
Ultimately, he doesn’t make the call, concluding “There’s nobody there I really wanted to talk to.” He closes the call by telling the operator “You can keep the dime,” which I suppose is something that would have to be explained to listeners today, like, oh, that line from “Easter Parade”: “You’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure.”
The other song might be sadder. “Photographs and Memories” isn’t sung to some third party, like a telephone line operator. It’s addressed to a lover long gone, though it’s clear from the lyrics that the lover isn’t there to hear it. Is the singer going through old belongings and thinking about how that’s all that’s left? Maybe.
Photographs and memories
Christmas cards you sent to me
All that I have are these
To remember youMemories that come at night
Take me to another time
Back to a happier day
When I called you mineBut we sure had a good time
When we started way back when
Morning walks and bedroom talks
Oh how I loved you then
There’s a beautiful sadness to the tune in the first two verses, but then Croce does something else with the chorus: he adopts a more cheerful tune as he remembers that “We sure had a good time….” But the verse ends on an unresolved chord, and so does the song. It’s like he can only get so close to finding happiness in his old memories before he returns to sad reverie. There’s something about sad memories of relationships that ended badly, isn’t there? You can remember the good times, but somehow the sadness takes them over and you almost feel guilty for remembering the earlier times with a smile.
Anyway, here’s Jim Croce with “Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels)” and “Photographs and Memories”. Oh, and pay attention to Croce’s guitar work. There’s some very deft playing here, especially in “Operator”, where the guitar almost forms a kind of countermelody to the tune he is singing.
Share This Post
Repost: From the Books: Douglas Hofstadter on the Rubik’s Cube
A repost, first published in 2014, on the occasion of the anniversary yesterday of inventor Erno Rubik’s birth on July 13, 1944. Thank you for all the puzzling fun and intrigue, Professor Rubik!
And as noted below, I *still* need a Megaminx, because of its dodecahedral shape….
My uncle Jerry once told me an awful joke:
What goes, “Click–do I have it yet? Click–do I have it yet? Click–do I have it yet?”
Answer: Stevie Wonder doing a Rubik’s Cube.
I know. Awful.
Anyway, many squeals of delight reverberated through the online world yesterday as Google’s doodle turned out to be a quite-functional Rubik’s Cube, in honor of the puzzle’s 40th anniversary. That’s amazing to me, another milestone of a passage of time that just doesn’t feel that long. I remember the first times I saw the puzzle, in the toy store of the Beaverton Mall in Portland, OR. This was late 1980 or early 1981, when the Cube was just starting to become the most popular thing going.
Eventually I got one, courtesy my parents, and I fiddled with it a lot until I could get two sides complete at the same time. But I was never able to crack the thing entirely, and I think my father was intrigued by the puzzle’s mathematical nature, so he sprang for a solution book, through which we pored until we both saw how the thing worked and how it could be returned to its pristine state, usually in a smaller-than-expected sequence of moves. The logical approach to solving the Cube, which I have long since forgotten, was really quite elegant, and I occasionally want to revisit it, now that I’m old enough to appreciate such things. At the time, for an awkward fifth grader in a new school, the ability to solve a Rubik’s Cube turned out to be quite the ice-breaker. (It may have also cemented my reputation as a soft and nerdy kid, but hey, it wasn’t like I was going to be on the football team anytime soon, anyway.)
Years later, in college, I bought a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Metamagical Themas, which was the title of a series of columns Hofstadter wrote for Scientific American back in the day. Hofstadter is an interesting person, although frankly whenever I read him (and I haven’t read him in too, too long), I got the feeling that I was peeking through a knothole in a fence into an awfully grand universe. In short, he was often way over my head. But he did write two columns about the Rubik’s Cube, which he found appealing as a puzzle and as a mathematical object. Both columns are presented in the book, and I excerpt the first of them here:
The Magic Cube is much more than just a puzzle. It is an ingenious mechanical invention, a pastime, a learning tool, a source of metaphors, an inspiration. It now seems an inevitable object, but it took a long time to be discovered. Somehow, though, the time was ripe, because the idea germinated and developed nearly in parallel in Hungary and Japan and perhaps even elsewhere. A report surfaced recently of a French inspector general named Semah, who claims to remember encountering such a cube made out of wood in 1920 in Istanbul and then again in 1935 in Marseilles. Of course, without confirmation the claims seem dubious, but still titillating. In any event, Rubik’s work was completed by 1975, and his Hungarian patent bears that date. Quite independently, Terutoshi Ishige, a self-taught engineer and owner of a small ironworks near Tokyo, came up with much the same design within a year of Rubik and filed for a Japanese patent in 1976. Ishige also deserves credit for this wonderful insight.
…
When I first heard the cube described over the telephone, it sounded like a physical impossibility. By all logic, it ought to fall apart into its constituent “cubies” (one of the many useful and amusing terms invented by “cubists” around the world). Take any corner cubie — what is it attached to? By imagining rotating each of the three faces to which it belongs, you can see that the corner cubie in question is detachable from each of its three edge-cubie neighbors. So how in the world is it held in place? Some people postulate magnets, rubber bands, or elaborate systems of twisting wires in the interior of the cube, yet the design is remarkably simple and involves no such items.
In fact, the Magic Cube can be disassembled in a few seconds, revealing an internal structure so simple that one has to ponder how it can do what it does. To see what holds it together, first observe that there are three types of cubie: six center cubies, twelve edge cubies, and eight corner cubies. Each center cubie has only one “facelet”; edge cubies have two, corner cubies have three. Moreover, the six center cubies are really not cubical at all — they are just square facades covering the tips of axles that sprout out from a sixfold spindle in the cube’s heart. The other cubies, however, are nearly complete little cubes, except that each one has a blunt little “foot” reaching toward the middle of the cube, and some curved nicks facing inward.
The basic trick is that the cubies mutually hold one another in by means of their feet, without any cubie actually being attached to any other. Edge cubies hold corner cubies’ feet, corner cubies hold edge cubies’ feet. Center cubies are the keystones. As any layer, say the top one, rotates, it holds itself together horizontally, and is held in place vertically by its own center and by the equatorial layer below it. The equatorial layer has a sunken center track (formed by the nicks in its cubies) that guides the motion of the upper layer’s feet and helps to hold the upper layer together. Unless you’re a mechanical genius, you can’t really understand this without a picture, or better yet, the real thing.
…
It is likely that many people will buy cubes, little suspecting the profound difficulty of the “basic mathematical problem”. They will innocently turn four or five faces, and suddenly find themselves hopelessly lost. Then, perhaps frantically, they will begin turning face after face one way and then another, as it dawns on them that they have irretrievably lost something precious. When this first happened to me, it reminded me of how I felt as a small boy, when I accidentally let go of a toy balloon and helplessly watched it drift irretrievably into the sky.
It is a face that the cube can be randomized with just a few turns. Let that be a warning to the beginner. Many beginners try to claw their way back to START by first getting a single face done. Then, a bit stymied, they leave their partially solved cube lying around where a friend may spot it. The well known “Don’t touch it!” syndrome sets in when the friend innocently picks it up and says, “What’s this?” The would-be solver, terrified that all their hard-won progress will be destroyed, shrieks, “Don’t touch it!” Ironically, victory can come only through a more flexible attitude allowing precisely that destruction.
In a postscript, Hofstadter adds:
I finally must confront the matter of the cube fad’s passing. David Singmaster’s Cubic Circular is going under after Volume 8. Many thousands of Megaminxes [a puzzle similar to a Rubik’s Cube, but dodecahedral in shape] were melted down for their plastic. Uwe Meffert’s puzzle club seems to have been a flop. The Skewb and many other wonderful objects I described never hit the stands. A few that did were almost immediately gone forever. So…have we seen the last of the Magic Cube? Are those cubes you bought going to be collector’s items? Well, I am always loath to predict the future, but in this case I will make an exception. I am bullish on the cube. It seemed to seize the imagination wherever it went. Despite the line concluding my second cube column, the cubic fad finally did spill over into the Soviet Union.
In my opinion, the world simply overdosed on cube-mania for a while. We humans are now collectively sick of the cube, but our turned-off state won’t last too long — no more than it lasts when you tell yourself “I’ll never eat spaghetti again!” after gorging on it. I predict that cubes will resurface slowly, here and there, and I am even hopeful that some new varieties will appear now and then. This is Mother Lode country. There may never again be quite the Gold Rush we witnessed a couple of years ago, but there’s still plenty of gold in them thar hills!
I’ve just decided that I needed a Megaminx. Among other things, the shape of the dodechedron plays a role in the Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) series.
Long live the Cube!
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
This one I owe to YouTube, which served this up as a completely random suggestion based on however their algorithms work.
In 1950, conductor Arturo Toscanini had plans for a large-scale symphonic suite inspired by New York City, but he never got the project finished. Before the idea foundered, though, he commissioned a part of it from Duke Ellington, who is only one of the great jazz musicians of all time–in fact, Ellington might well be the greatest jazz musician of all time.
The result of this was a symphonic work titled, simply, Harlem. Ellington intended the work as a musical tour of Harlem, exploring its character through musical interludes and sonic pictures. The work is jazzy, obviously, but unmistakably urban in its sound, as it takes us from a bluesy beginning to bustling streetscapes to percussion dances to mournful funereal passages. It’s quite a work, and I had never heard it until YouTube’s algorithm suggested it to me.
This performance is by my own local band, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Here is Duke Ellington’s Harlem.
Share This Post
Round about we go….
OK, here’s a question regarding driving behavior and roundabouts: Do you use your turn signal when entering one?
But before I get to that, let me just note that I love roundabouts. I find them civilized and much less prone to idiotic bullshit than your typical 4-way intersection. There’s no running red lights, and there are no pesky left turns which always gum things up. Studies a-plenty have demonstrated that roundabouts are not only safer (producing far fewer accidents per capita than standard intersections), they also move more traffic through an intersection in a given time than lights or the combination of four-way stops and relying on people to know the right-of-way rules will.
(On that last topic: People suck at right-of-way these days, and it’s only getting worse. What happens at YIELD signs always irritates me: if you have no sign and I’m sitting at a YIELD, what happens is YOU GO, and I wait until you’ve passed to do anything. What is not supposed to happen is you coming to a complete stop and waving at me to go. The same similar thing happens at 4-way stops all the time. If two cars arrive at the same time, the one on the right is supposed to go. What actually happens, if I’m the car on the left, is that the nitwit on the right starts waving at me to go. This shit drives me crazy and my approach is to ignore the waving and look the other way until they go. But anyway, back to roundabouts.)
I see more and more roundabouts in my travels these days. There’s been on in the village of East Aurora for years, and now there are several in the village of Hamburg (more on that below). I’ve even learned, via Facebook, that my old hometown of Olean has several roundabouts in its downtown! I’m sure this went over very poorly down there, just from what I remember of that city’s denizens: it’s a very conservative area that tends to be deeply resistant to change. Sure enough, a Facebook group I occasionally check out about Olean’s history had a thread recently about the roundabouts, and there was comment after comment to the effect of “I HATE THE ROUNDABOUTS!” And one fellow actually said my favorite talking point when people want to resist change: “Roundabouts work great in Europe, but they’re not for Americans!”
I always wonder just why such people think that “Americans are too dumb and/or stuck in their ways to do anything new at all, ever” is such a virtue, but again, I digress.
So, back to the roundabouts in Hamburg. There’s one right in the village core, and as we travel to Hamburg every week for a trip to a bakery there and to the Farmers Market in the summer months, we go through this roundabout more than any other. On this past Saturday we drove through there, and something odd happened. Here, via Google Maps, is the roundabout in question:
We were at the spot labeled B in the pic, heading west, into the village. Ahead of us was another car (who had already done a couple of confusing things, which made all this stand out in my head). This car was at position A, just about to enter the roundabout and therefore bear right, when they turned on their left turn signal. This is because they were heading for position C.
And I thought, “What the hell are they signaling for?!”
Now, I can see the logic, sort-of. If this was a 4-way intersection with a light or STOP signs, the driver at A would have been making a left turn, hence the left signal. But this is not a 4-way intersection! It’s a roundabout, and since it keeps traffic moving at all times and since each act of exiting is a right turn, I maintain that there is no need to signal at all when negotiating the roundabout, no matter which way you’re going. If you’re in front of me in a roundabout, it does not make any difference at all where you’re turning. There are only two possibilities in a roundabout: exit, or keep going around. Which one you’re doing at each exit point does not matter to me at all. There is nothing for me to do with that information.
What say you, folks? Am I all wet (and guilty possibly of crappy driving)? Should I be signaling my way into and through the roundabout?
(Note that this is only about this kind of roundabout, not the more complex ones you find in larger cities where there are things to contend with like lane changes.)
Share This Post
From the Books: SEASONS OF A FINGER LAKES WINERY (On Geography in fiction and elsewhere)
I’m reading a book right now called Seasons of a Finger Lakes Winery, by John C. Hartsock. The book is just that: a year in the life of a single winery in New York’s Finger Lakes region, a place where wine and winemaking have become a major industry and a vital part of the tourist trade there. I’ll have more to say about the book later on (I’m greatly enjoying it!), but for now I want to highlight this lovely passage that captures some of the geographical appeal of the region for me.
I’ve enjoyed the Finger Lakes ever since the first time I visited them as a not-quite-ten-year-old kid when we moved to New York, but over the last fifteen years or so that region has become my dream place. If I were suddenly gifted enough financial resource to live any place on Earth, I would live among the Finger Lakes: maybe on the shores of Cayuga Lake near Ithaca, or perhaps on Seneca Lake up by Geneva, or maybe along Canandaigua or even a small cottage on one of the smaller lakes, like Honeoye or Conesus. I’ve been reading a bit about the Finger Lakes, off and on over the last couple of years, as research and story-fodder for a story sequence that I’d like to write one day, and this passage is from one of those books.
In this passage, Gary and Rosie–the owners of the winery on which the book focuses–are taking a day off from their winery operations, which are on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake, to visit a different winery, which is on the western shore of Keuka Lake. As the crow flies, the distance is maybe fifty miles. The driving distance is at least seventy miles, depending on route, and a lot of that is two-lane roads.
Here is our author:
From Ithaca they turned west to Watkins Glen. It’s one of the anomalies of travel in this part of the world that most through roads generally run north to south because the lie of the lakes is north-south. If you could go due west the trip might be cut to forty-five minutes. But there were those lakes, a mile to two miles wide and up to thirty-five miles long that you had no choice but to drive around. In certain place names you can detect references to a long-ago ferry, such as King Ferry. But the days when farmers ferried their teams of horses and wagons loaded with produce across the lakes were long gone. The result is that today, with the automobile, most of your travel is north-south, with occasional short jogs east-west between the lakes. This was particularly true because of Cayuga and Seneca Lakes, the two largest and longest of the Finger Lakes. But it was also true of the other Finger Lakes–Owasco, Skaneateles, Keuka (the crooked lake shaped like a Y), and Canandaigua. Then there are a number of smaller lakes. Glaciation had decreed the north-south disposition, and in losing the east-west orientation you lost your bearings–travelers bypassed the region. The result was that the necks of land between the lakes seemed forgotten by time. One could see it in villages such as Mecklenburg, where houses had weathered to a washed-out gray from lack of paint. This region is, after all, the home of the original Podunk (just northwest of Ithaca), which is little more than an empty crossroad.
This is all quite true. New York is in two distinct parts: a region that spans farther north-to-south than it does east-to-west, at the top of which is Lake Champlain and at the bottom of which is New York City. This region tapers toward the long, somewhat narrow region that extends several hundred miles east-to-west but is only maybe about a hundred to a hundred twenty miles wide at its widest. Here you find cities along the northern portion: Syracuse, Rochester, Batavia, Buffalo; and you also find smaller cities along what’s called the Southern Tier, the counties that border Pennsylvania: Binghamton, Elmira, Corning, Olean, Jamestown.
And for about 75 miles in the middle, between the two tiers, is a sequence of eleven long, narrow, and deep lakes formed millennia ago by the glaciers that spread over New York and then retreated. These lakes, the Finger Lakes, make it so that for a large chunk of the middle portion of the state, east-west travel means going north and then south again, or vice-versa. You can drive straight across the state from Jamestown to Binghamton, and you can do the same thing from Buffalo to Albany…but if you want to drive a straight line from Dunkirk to Cortland? It’s not going to happen, because of the lakes and their deep valleys. (And also the deep canyon of Letchworth State Park, which might be a Finger Lake that didn’t work out because the Genessee River broke through and remained a river, instead of filling its canyon.)
When you read about the growth of the wine industry in the Finger Lakes, one word that always turns up is microclimate: the individual lakes, by the nature of their length and depth as well as the depth of their individual valleys (there are places where the vistas above the Finger Lakes put me in mind of pictures I’ve seen of the lochs of the Scottish Highlands), create very small regions where the climate is perfect for certain grape varietals. That climate vanishes just a few miles away in any direction, but amongst the lakes? Especially the bigger ones? That’s where the lay of this relatively small portion of land makes magic happen.
With microclimate in mind, I would coin another word: microcharacter. Each lake feels like it is its own world in itself, and even though one lake is just a few miles from the next, there is always something rather unique about each one, and when you drive straight from one to the next, your course takes you up, up, up over a long rise–and then you crest and you know you’ve left that lake behind and are descending down, down, down to the next one. Every year when we travel to Ithaca we take one of these routes back at the end of the day, and since this annual trip is one of my most beloved rituals, it’s when we crest the rise from the Cayuga Lake valley and cross over into the Seneca Lake valley that I’m always saddest. That’s when I know that the day is over and that Ithaca is behind me for another year.
As a writer, this affect of the directions of the lakes is an important one as well, because this shows perfectly how geography affects character of a place. The nature of the land in the Finger Lakes region pretty much makes it impossible for an Interstate Highway to go through there: there isn’t even a north-south Interstate through the Finger Lakes, much less an east-west one. Interstate 390 runs from Rochester south, skirting the western edge of the Finger Lakes region; to the east, Interstate 81 runs from Binghamton to Syracuse (and beyond). Ithaca lies entirely off the Interstate Highway system, and it’s all the better off for that, I think. Could there be Interstates through the Finger Lakes? I suppose there could, but the question then would be…why? What would be gained from running, say, Interstate 286 from Owego northward to Auburn? Or a similar stretch from Corning, snaking between Keuka and Seneca Lakes, to I-90 someplace between Canandaigua and Geneva? And an east-west route between Geneseo and Cortland would be pointless, even setting aside the huge expense of constructing a series of really ugly concrete bridges across seven Finger Lakes.
Hartsock is right when he notes the “lost in time” feel of all the little villages in the Finger Lakes region, and he’s astute in noting why. One thing you notice when driving through the region is lots of train tracks: there used to be a lot of railroading through the Finger Lakes, but even that has slowed to a crawl, and some of the railbeds are being converted into walking trails. Again the geography shapes the region: the ever-ongoing speedening-up of commerce of the last century has largely left behind a region where the land itself acts as barrier to commerce. I do drive through all of those towns, not just the ones between the Lakes but the old rail towns north of them, with a sense that it’s a shame the world has left them in the dust, and a wish that they could capture a bit of their old prosperity again…but not too much. After all, if things get too rich, that’s when powerful people far away start looking at maps and seeing things like roads that aren’t there.
So, fiction writers (I’m talking about fantasy and SF writers here, who are working in made-up worlds) should think in terms not just of how geography affects things like commerce and trade and wars, but how geography affects a region’s entire character. What’s it like to be a young kid in a town that has gone several generations since the last trains ran? How does it feel to live in a village that was hewn from a rocky ravine more than two hundred years ago and watch the entire world heating up while your seasons remain pretty much the same?
And what’s it like to live in a place like that and make your living doing something that requires huge investments of time in a world that values investments of time less and less?
Share This Post
Diggin’ Up Bones (#AmWriting)
The other day I was looking for something completely different in my archives, and I found a post from July 2010, eleven years ago:
I haven’t talked about writing in a while, so here’s a brief note about it. My main energy lately has been going to the space opera project I’ve had in my head for seven or eight years now; it’s an idea that’s been kicking around and kicking around and kicking around, until I finally decided that hell, it was just time to start writing the thing. The entire long-form story involves two princesses from some planet who leave their world to take their first trip to the Galactic Capital, or something like that. But on the way, their starship experiences some [ahem] technical difficulties and they end up on a strange planet they’ve never heard of before.
All the set-up and such took me through eight chapters, all well and good. All the while I’ve maintained two files, in which I keep lists of my characters as I introduce them (or merely mention them), and lists of the locations I either use or mention. This way I’m not scrounging about later, wondering what star systems I needed names for, or who lives where, that sort of thing. I’m not one to make big encyclopedia-type profiles for my characters — my theory is that if the character’s favorite movie or preferred sleepwear comes up in the course of the story, my character will fill in the blanks when we get to that point — but I do want to be able to keep things straight.
So anyway, my two princesses have just arrived on Planet Whosis, which is ruled by A Guy, who has A Son.
And I don’t have names for any of them. Not the Planet, not the Guy, not the Son (actually, I do have a name for the Son), not the Possibly Evil Councillor, not the Leader of the Rebel Faction, and certainly not the Odd Looking But Extremely Lethal Weapon They Use On This Planet.
As far as I can tell, this is the first time I mentioned in this space the writing project that became Stardancer. At this point I didn’t have a title for that book, and I certainly didn’t have a title for the entire series! I didn’t come up with The Song of Forgotten Stars until not long before I had to have the book ready for publishing. At this point I had my main characters: Tariana, Margeth, and Lt. Rasharri, and not much else. Tariana’s name was actually Tarina at first, but I didn’t like the way that sounded so I added the extra vowel syllable. I seem to recall modifying Lt. Rasharri’s name in some way, but I don’t recall exactly how.
At that point I had the basic scenario down, but one set of character relationships didn’t work at first, so I had to make some significant changes, making Prince Joskin not the son of the actual mad King but of the son of the mad King’s brother…and at this point I had no idea that Master Gharanas, who was just a guy who showed up at one point where I needed a hot-tempered young man to burst angrily onto the scene, would stick around as the story’s single most important male character and eventual love interest to Princess Tariana.
Now I’m writing the fifth book in this series, this many years later, and looking back at the very beginning feels…interesting. It’s like looking at something that’s familiar but isn’t quite a memory, if that makes any sense. And to think that the main idea for The Song of Forgotten Stars actually came to me ten years before that….
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
Here’s a deep cut from a classic musical! Singin’ in the Rain would be my favorite musical of all time if not for My Fair Lady, and like all the greatest musicals, it is packed with songs and numbers, some of which are classics in their own right. But there are several other numbers in the film that aren’t as well-known, for one reason or another. One of these is the “Beautiful Girl Montage”.
This number appears in the film just after the silent film industry has been absolutely rocked by the first “talkie”, The Jazz Singer, which is forcing all of the studios to adapt to the new sound format. Among other things, the arrival of sound in motion pictures kick-started the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical, which this montage illustrates. But after a brief montage in which several songs (“I’ve Got a Feeling You’re Fooling”, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll”, and “Shall I?”) are mashed together (mash-ups aren’t at all new!) in a pretty frantic, zippy sequence before the tempo slows and we settle into a single number: “Beautiful Girl”.
In the film, “Beautiful Girl” is a number that is being shot for a new movie by the studio that our main characters work for. It’s kind of an odd-duck of a number that features exactly none of the main leads, except for Debbie Reynolds, who is in the number only as one of the “girls” who looks adoringly at the guy who sings the song (who is only seen in the film long enough to perform this number).
As for “the guy who sings the song”, he’s an actor named Jimmy Thompson who seems to have had very little by way of a career. He had thirteen credits, the biggest one probably as one of the crewmen in Forbidden Planet. He would show up in another Gene Kelly musical, Brigadoon, but for his one big number there, “I’ll Go Home With Bonnie Jean,” his voice was dubbed. Come to that, I don’t know if he was also dubbed for “Beautiful Girl”, in which he seems to have a bigger, actually impressive voice.
“Beautiful Girl” is not one of the more popular numbers from Singin’ in the Rain, but I’ve always loved it as a bit of scene-setting and world-building, with its 1920s aesthetic. It doesn’t really move things along other than to provide and in-universe reason for Debbie Reynolds’s Kathy Selden to be in the same place as Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood, but so what? I’ve never been one to insist that the plot must be advanced at all moments. Plus, I love some of the wordplay in this song and it’s swinging tune.
Here’s the “Beautiful Girl Montage” from Singin’ in the Rain.