Gridley Fires

The Change is here

For all the readers of this blog - - 

My time with Typepad is gone now, and I want to thank all of you who visited here regularly. You can follow me - and view my post history from Typepad - on my new Wordpress blog, also entitled Gridley Fires.

What Is There To Learn From Writing?

image via karenswhimsy.com

 

Today, I'll finish the third edit of a historical novel I've written set in the Middle Ages, and this has me looking back. I started research on this rather obscure subject and personality some 20 years ago, and then came compiling and synthesizing the data. The story involves a man who rose from the French peasantry to the Catholic Church's papacy in a time of great social upheaval - not unlike the world-wide era we now live in. 

But to begin answering my question...

This quest began, rather obviously, with an adult dose of curiosity about this man, and the era he helped shape. This was a time in which singular personalities - rather than the masses - affected an era's progress - or its missteps. Fascinating to consider that from the viewpoint of life in the 21st century, isn't it?

Compiling data in such a quest - even ragarding an era in which few records were kept, and much of what is there holds conflicting perspectives, dates, accounts, etc. - is an exercise in organization, and this skill is planted firmly in my wheelhouse. 

But how to tell the story?

I'm discovering, especially with historical fiction, that this is a separate talent, and it concerns many challenges. First, the temptation is to make a historical treatise of it, but this isn't what fiction is all about. And for such a story to be readable and relevant, the characters must be there, must bring the history, which can seem overarching and distant, down to the personal level.

So I've taken a page from Scott Fitzgerald and created a second character to complement the historical one. Still there was a problem. Even these two characters couldn't make the story come full circle. The limitations of these two characters' experience was unable to close the deal, since both had to die, and so my structure required yet a third character. This one, of course, couldn't be simply a "throw-in;" he had to be an integral part of the story.

This called for much finagling and restructuring even before I began to write. I ended up then with a chancy structure,the story being told in the form of a book. A book within a book. Shades of J.M Coetzee!

I think I've done a decent job of telling this story, but is it too odd structurally? Will the casual reader be confused? Will readers of any stripe be informed and entertained by it? 

It absolutely begs for another set of eyes, and so a writing colleague will see it next. Then, depending on her reaction, I may submit it to an indie editor for opinion and advice.

So what's to learn in telling such a story? You'll learn that creativity goes far beyond wordsmithing. It involves proper use of history. Characterization that does justice to the history. An underlying structure to support all of that. And perhaps most importantly: the reader - have you made your story accessible? Story is the thing, as always, but there must be readers for the story to complete itself.

 

Visit Bob's Web Site here, and his FB Fan Page here.

The Ice of Winter

Winter Journal, by Paul Auster

image via npr.org 

 

You pick up memoir such as this one expecting...what? A life laid out chronologically? The failures of parenting - yours and that of your parents? Confessions and dirty linen? The titillation of romantic escapades? Saucy comments about other writers, editors, or reviewers? The summation of a life lived well or poorly?

Auster gives you some of that, but what stands out to you is the writing: the fluid, run-on style in which sentences can last half a page, paragraphs that go on interminably, but without boring, without allowing your mind to wander, making use of the first person tool of "you" instead of the usual "I,"which has that distancing feeling that a memoir deserves. A style with an affinity for lists (places he's lived, sweets he's eaten), a running rivulet of emotions regarding family, lovers, places he's been, people - good and bad - he's been related to or otherwise known. 

Somehow you expect such a memoir to rise slowly as the author encounters life's crises and victories, you expect it to end as fiction does, with crisis point and denouement, but that's not at all what Auster gives you. In places he does just that, though, but in the broader perspective he gives you things as he encounters them in memory, following their sixty-plus years.

 

image via guardian.co.uk 

 

Does he give you any reason to doubt this work's veracity, to say to yourself, "Bullshit, he's gilding the lily there?" Only over one subject do you cock an eyebrow in such a manner: his constantly interspersed romantic conquests. Yet even here he doesn't dwell on them, he depicts them on the run, all part of the stream of life coughing its way over its now smooth-worn rocks, until, finally, the ice begins to gather, the ice of - as he tells you on the last page, "the winter of your life," in which you see, with him, the sense of an American life's hubbub. 

As memoirs go, it's one you're glad you've read.

 

My rating: 18 of 20 stars

 See Bob's web site here, and FB Fan Page here.

 

Bucky Fuller's Vision and Why I Continue To Write

Last night the missus and I went to see a play, "R. Buckminster Fuller - The History (and Mystery) of the Universe." I'm not sixteeen years old, so I hesitate to use the word "awesome," but the play was, well, awesome. For several reasons:

• Playwright D.S. Jacobs synthesized thousands of pages of R. Buckminster Fuller's writing into a two-hour show.
• Actor David Novak was the only person on stage, and his talent nailed Fuller's mannerisms, even his coastal Massachusetts way of talking. 
• As serendipity would have it, the set for this local production was designed by good friend Sylvia Pierce, which incorporated tekkie bits, such as film, animation, and geodesic modeling - one of the best sets I've seen in years.

But can I synthesize further? Let's see...

image via essential-architecture.com

Fuller was born near-blind. Consequently he had to use his tactile sense to relate to early school projects. While we were all using building blocks (Leggos, maybe) to construct in a fledgling way what turns out to be a most inefficient and irrational "square" reality, Fuller's hands were creating things from triangles that were far more sound and efficient than our "square" cartesian world. 

He flunked out of Harvard twice, largely because he was already headed toward a reality that educating minds of his age weren't ready to accept. So he continued to go his own way. He joined the Navy. Shipboard life made him much more aware of the necessity of ultra-efficiency in sailing across "Spaceship Earth," as he came to call it.

After leaving the Navy, he quickly came to realize from his examination of the way nature works that the Darwinian, Malthusian model of scarce resources (that could only belong to the strong - and to hell with the weak and less capable) was wrong and would eventually lead us toward oblivion, extinction. His strategy, then, was to create a new mindset that would be so capable of doing so much more with less and less, hence eminently attractive, that the old divide-and-conquer model, enforced militarily, would be abandoned. 

image via scodpub.wordpress.com

 

But he didn't deal just in high-minded abstractions: he devised and designed - the geodesic sphere, the dymaxion cars and homes. Still, fear of scarcity and an infatuation with inefficient  thinking, building, and wealth, caused his creations to be all but ignored. But this play, and the continuing interest in Fuller's inventions and ideas testify to their endurance. 

But none of this explains why I continue to write:

Fuller left the old mindset - and his Navy days - and so did I. While he reached much higher, I chose a career built on constructing instead of destroying - devising and building road systems within the U.S. Parallel with that, and following those years, I began to write fiction and nonfiction. Still, why?

While Fuller persisted with the continuing ephemeralization (doing more with less) of technology, I chose the human angle. Humanity is all about story, and the stories of us humans are replete with both our foibles and our strengths. I learned early on, of course, not to editorialize or to rant - simply to tell human stories as best I could.

In this way, I can only hope my readers will be provoked to think for themselves. If they do, says Fuller, they will increasingly leave behind a mindset - one that worked for ages, but which humanity has now outgrown. And I believe that's so. Story is a manner of mirroring our ways, of providing essential human questions that must be asked, in hopes that we'll have that "Aha!" moment and - one by one - change our lives and the world for the better.

 

Visit Bob's Web Site here, and his FB Fan Page here.

The Real Arbitrage

Arbitrage - The Movie

image via imdb.com

 

Boy, posting on this one is going to be hard without sounding the spoiler alert...

Well, here goes.

With the missus out of town, I chanced upon this one on pay per view on a Saturday night. I think she would have wanted to see it - not for my economic/political interests in the flick, but because she's a Susan Sarandon fan. Still, the movie is virtually all Richard Gere's - he plays robert Miller, a hedge fund kingpin, but one with something of a conscience and a heart.

Miller has been wanting to make a last killing, on a copper mine, before bowing out of the biz and (hopefully) turning everything over to his financial whiz daughter. But there's something of a cash flow problem, and some hanky panky with a young woman art dealer. Of course, both situations get out of control, and the remainder of the movie is built around the ensuing suspense as Miller tries to manage his crises.

Three things interested me about the movie as I watched it, and afterward as I sought to make sense of the abruptly ending tale: I thought, as the romantic crisis heats up, that this is a movie clone of a rather famous political tryst, but that isn't the case. I'm hesitant to let that cat out of the bag to any greater degree, but Tim Roth plays the overreaching cop in trying to place blame where it's obviously meant to be. 

Second, the acting is nuanced and real-life - Gere playing the wheeler dealer, Sarandon, playing his family-protective wife, Ellen. I had the sense that both were improvising script a lot, possibly acting out aspects of their own lives. Since the movie was largely Gere's vehicle, Sarandon had to sublimate her script and her acting to his, and in such situations, said actor has to pick her spot to shine. Sarandon does this, without upstaging or undermining - the skill of a consummate actor. 

And third, the movie is a morality play without seeming so. You see, no one's a clear-cut villain or hero; consequently the story deals with ambiguities akin to those we all slog through in real life. And the real arbitrage of the story has more to do with family than a financial empire.

Arbitrage has all the elements of a finely done movie: fine acting, a thoughtful premise, and a clever story line. Well worth a couple hours of your time.

My rating: 18 of 20 stars

 

Visit Bob's website here, and his FB Fan Page here.

Finding One's Way

This may or may not prove intertesting to readers of this post, but after reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and another book I'll post on soon), I watched the movie(s) the book(s) inspired. It occurred that while many others may have read one and seen the other, maybe they haven't drawn a contrast. So I'll give it a shot.

image via amazon.com

 

The 1977 movie version of Portrait accomplished a rare and admirable thing: it strayed not a whit from Joyce's book. If the flick had any shortcomings in that respect, it was that the ninety minutes remaining after editing gave much of Joyce's autobiographical self, Stephen Daedalus, short shrift.

But to this viewer's interesting part.

While my reading of the book seemed what was probably not an abnormal coming of age in early twentieth century Ireland (or much of anywhere else), the movie's nuances seemed markedly different. In the book, Daedalus' childhood found him, after acclimating to his family's strictures, in a parochial school that placed discipline above learning, fear of the Divinity above spiritual growth. As young Stephen matured, he explored religion, sex, learning (of a more generic sort), arriving at something of a provisional personal philosophy that was (we assume) to govern his adult life.

The move version, though, seemed to add another dimension to this journey-to-adulthood - - that each phase was an attempt at seduction. I'm emphasizing that because, first, that's what cinema does: it's sensorial, and it seduces. Second, it's easy to add such emotional leverage to such a well written and eminently well thought out book. But more importantly, because that's what life gives us at the end of the day - offering after offering of seduction. It offers the inviting security of family, the lure of faith in what is beyond our ability to perceive, and it entices us with attack after attack of intellectual enthrallment. 

What makes Portrait an important book in the western literary canon - and what I think the movie makes clearer than the book - is that while we're all subject to such a gauntlet in our youth, how we deal with these various seductions determines precisely who we become as adults, what we believe about ourselves and the world, and what we do with our lives and our talents.

 Visit Bob's website here and his FB fan page here.

Going One’s Own Way

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

image via plodit.com 

 

It sometimes takes a while to warm up to writing such as this first major work by James Joyce. His title tells the story cleanly enough, but there’s more to this bildungsroman than simply a young man coming of age in 1900s Ireland. 

The story is of a young man, Stephen Daedalus who, as we all have probably been in our youth, was subjugated to family, school, and religion. And in this era of Ireland’s history, these constitute a formidable albatross. I’m synopsizing to a great degree, but Daedalus’ first onus is a rather formal Catholic education, in which discipline is paramount. The school’s rules are an end unto themselves. 

Of course, this is a Catholic school, so the sensibilities of education and religious training are intermixed. Daedalus and his mates are cowed by this one-two societal punch, much time being spent listening to a priest telling the boys of the horrors of Hell. Daedalus’ reaction? “It put me in quite a blue funk.”

Young Stephen quickly comes to experience the carnal, courtesy of a girl he pursues, Eileen, and later, a fantasy girl. But these are just set-ups for the priests in his life to bestow guilt on him. Stephen hurries to confess his earlier life a way and considers a commitment to the priesthood. 

At this point the book - and Stephen - experience a sea change of sorts. He has two choices here: he can knuckle under to the approved Irish/Catholic lifestyle, or he can go his own way. And of course he chooses the latter.

Some of Joyce’s writerly techniques wouldn’t pass muster today, but that’s hardly a knock, since he did more than anyone of that generation (other than Hemingway) to change novel writing technique. Joyce plays the philosopher, the roue, and the iconoclast, perhaps in ways never played out on the page before. It must have been hard to accomplish what Daedalus managed toward self-determination, but then that’s what Joyce is giving his readers - the opportunity to throw off the burdens of an overly strict society and to go their own way.

 

My rating: 17 of 20 stars

 

 

The Universal Soldier

On Labor Day, the missus agreed to accompany me to an action flick (payback on that this weekend - more on that later), and so off we went to see The Bourne Legacy. Matt Damon and the Bourne franchise has been so successful, selling some $1 billion at the gate (according to Rotten Tomatoes), that the creative minds decided to chuck Robert Ludlum's stories altogether for one from their own fertile imagination. 

 

Bourne movies are all rife with backstory, and in this one, in which Jeremy Renner takes over the Bourne role, we discover that part of his discombobulated past has to do with having been a U.S. Army soldier amped up (and befuddled) by "chems," these to make him more physically agile and strong and more mentally alert and flexible. The plot throws Bourne together with Rachel Wiesz as Marta Shearing, the chem whiz who had a lot to do with Bourne's plight.

What makes the movie interesting is that it plays to the well-known compartmentalization of the Federal government, particularly the secretive, competing agencies, and the emerging myth of using such chemical devices to create super soldiers. Too, it plays on the popular theme of one man against the system (Bourne is capable of defeating all sorts of military hard technology with the softer technology of his over-chemmed physicality and mind).

It was easier for us to accept Bourne's exploits against technology than to buy the obligatory chase scene which seems all too fantastical. It's the sort of movie that entertains, but I don't advise taking its skulduggery as an artistc representation of real life.

My rating: 14 of 20 stars.

Real life Made Personal

 

Creative Nonfiction, Summer 2012 Issue

 

This isn’t a writer’s magazine, but then it is. First and foremost it’s a doorway to publication for writers in the genre of personalized, real-life subjects. Creative Nonfiction publishes experienced writers, writers with the ubiquitous MFAs and people who just happen to have a story to tell from their lives.

This particular issue (Lee Gutkind, the editor, usually assigns a theme to each issue and advertises it several months ahead) deals with the subject of true crime, even with the ethics of writing about crime. Why ethics, you ask? The issue’s roundtable discussion on the subject deals with that circuitously, but a lot of the concern has to do with romanticizing criminal acts. 

But this issue’s stories?

They’re all riveting, and most use Gutkind’s favored technique of weaving supporting facts into a personal account of crime. Among my favorites are:

AC Fraser tells of prison’s manner of having one submit to regimentation and rather demeaning life there, something she calls Identity Folding. 

Steven Church writes about one of the Tyson-Holyfield fights, in which Mike Tyson bit off a piece of one of Evander Holyfield’s ears.

Joyce Marcel’s account of robbing ancient graves in Peru of historical artifacts blends that derring-do with her sexual exploits.

The common thread through these stories is the ultra-personal, almost psychological approach to the persons involved in the various violations and violences. This isn’t reportage - it’s much more than that.

Again, editing such magazines in a Herculean task, and sometimes the approach taken doesn’t work. Gutkind’s approach for Creative Nonfiction does work in this issue, and it works well.

 

 

The Writer As Many Characters

image via awpwriter.org

The Writer’s Chronicle, September 2012 Issue

The Writer’s Chronicle is my “go-to” magazine for perspectives that will help me grow as a writer. Simple as that. It’s a university organ, and as such it leans toward the academic approach to creative writing; still, there’s plenty of relevance, for this seat-of-the-pants writer, at least. 

In the interest of time (yours - you’re welcome), I’m only going to spout off on two article/essays that interest me in this issue. One, “Borges as Self - Toward Teaching Creative Writers,” (see what I mean about the academic approach?) by Eric LeMay begins by using the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges as an example of many people inhabiting the creative writer’s psyche, and how to channel those personality complexities into fiction. 

All fiction writers at some point realize they are not the personality when they write that they are when “in real life." According to LeMay, the creative writing instructor’s task is first to make students aware of that personality divide, and then teach them how to accept it and use it. 

A quote from the article:

“When students develop an objective purchase on that part of their identities from which their writing emerges, they become more responsible for, in control of, and reflective about themselves as writers.” (emphasis is Lemay’s)

What the author of the article seems to be saying is that, properly done, creative writing instruction also helps create a more self-aware writer (emphasis mine), hence one not prone to vomit out psychoses on the page in self-indulgent fashion. Hence these writers become better, more responsible persons by becoming better writers.

The other article, “An Epistolary Plea,” by Heather Stanfill, interests me because I use the technique - and it's a way for your many personalities to shine. If you’re not familiar, it’s the use of your characters’ letters (remember writing letters, before e-mail and Facebook?) in a novel to shine a more detailed light on your characters’ makeups. Stanfill doesn’t go into a lot of detail here, but the proper use of the epistolary technique can do in a minimum of words  what it might take volumes more to do through internalization of the characters thoughts and though dialogue and action. 

It’s an old technique, and some have made use of e-mail in recent times to modernize it. Quite rightly, I think, Stanfill writes that for the epistolary technique to work using modern communication techniques will take some doing: these use slang, too-clipped language, and a tumble of data that give little to the reader in the way of characterization. Of course, someone will, sooner or later, make revolutionary use of this old tool in our modern settings.