Genesis of a Historical Novel

a python is born

2011-05-06T06:22:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since I've posted to this blog, but I've not been idle. For the past few months I've been working to publish another novel of mine, and I'm happy to announce that now it's done.

My literary thriller, Truth of the Python, is now for sale at Smashwords and on Amazon. In it, a hypnotherapist and his young client discover that they have unfinished business with each other--from twenty-five centuries ago.

Right now it's priced at $0.99. I warmly invite you to check it out. Download a sample, or be bold and spring for the whole price right up front, read it, and write a review. Tell me and the world what you think of it.

I've also got a new website with a new blog. Come on over.

Back to work...

on hiatus

2008-10-27T07:39:00.000-07:00

Friends, I seem to be on hiatus for the time being.

Now in the mornings I find myself often wanting just to press on with my research notes rather than pausing to write a blog-post. With a project so long in the making, I'm following that impulse.

Things are going reasonably well. The mornings are dark now: it's still mostly dark outside my blinds, which I have yet to open. I was out in the chilly morning to take out the recycling and unlock the garbage-box behind our building. I really like the autumn, a time of promise in some obscure way. In the bustle of work, especially in the dark of morning, when people are returning to their tasks after lounging in the summer, I feel a sense of quiet ease and relaxation--and did even when I was part of that bustle. The world continues to be beautiful, even as people rush through it. You just have to tune your attention to it.

So that's it: I'm officially on vacation from my blog. Many thanks to all of you who have dropped by and read my thoughts. I wish you well.

disaster redux

2008-10-16T07:15:00.000-07:00

Autumn descends on us, with the mornings turning chilly and damp. Roofers have been at work on our building over the past two weeks, and in the past three days have been right over our unit, ripping and thumping, making the wooden structure tremble. Down here in my office I'm as far from that action as I can get, but I do have young guys passing to and fro by my office window, carrying sheets of plywood and answering calls to their cell-phones.

Kimmie is still undergoing the long tail of this headcold (mine is pretty much completely gone). Her voice is still wispy and her ears are plugged. Another way of marking the change of season.

In the wider world we have the ructions of the financial and stock markets. We're overdue for an economic depression, so I'm expecting one--and expecting it to be long and severe. I believe that when historians look back on this era, they will shake their heads at how so many government policies and private practices could have been undertaken that were so wrongheaded and that led so surely to disaster--much as historians now look at the policies and practices that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Ben Bernanke, the head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is a scholar of the Great Depression. But policymakers, like generals, are always refighting the last war rather than addressing the situation before them.

I've mentioned before how events have the look of the three-stage unfolding of an ancient Greek tragedy: koros, hubris, and ate (surfeit, outrageous behavior, and disaster). By the time of the great tragedians of Athens, ate had come to mean objective, external disaster--retribution for one's ill-starred actions. But as E. R. Dodds observes in his book The Greeks and the Irrational, the term ate in earlier, Homeric times had a different meaning:

Always, or practically always, ate is a state of mind--a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity...

But what is insanity? Literally, it means mental unhealthiness or unwholesomeness. A disconnect from reality.

That sounds like what starts the tragic cycle. For koros is "surfeit" according to Arnold J. Toynbee--doing too much of something. But doing too much of something is itself a sign of lack of realism: you have too high a regard for your own powers to control things, to make things go as you wish. You lack humility, and so are led on to hubris, "outrageous action"--doing things that reflect your unrealistic self-assessment. You make big mistakes. And the locomotive of big mistakes pulls a train of painful consequences--ate.

So I suppose ate, the painful consequences, can be viewed from either the external angle (disaster) or from the internal angle ("insanity"). For external disaster in itself is neutral, you might say; it is our response to it, our feelings about it, that constitute its pain and suffering. Ate then seems to be both the disasters caused by our foolish actions, and the suffering that results.

One dark note of the "insanity" model is that it doesn't suggest learning. The crazy person, after an "episode", gradually becomes quiescent again. Peace returns--and further opportunities for surfeit...

I think it was Voltaire who said:

History never repeats itself;
Man always does.

What can I say? Here we go again.

darkness ahead

2008-10-06T07:35:00.000-07:00

Where have I been, you ask?

Well, Kimmie and I have been working our way through a headcold, caught we know not where. I got it first, and probably passed it on to her. I'm very much better, but Kimmie is going through the middle of hers. Indeed, she's decided to take today off work.

I've been chipping away at my mighty work, and at the ideas surrounding and supporting it. This is a huge task, and one that I don't think I can really discuss in this blog, since I don't want to go too deeply into my own views of the meanings of my still unfinished work.

Then I'm feeling a certain blog-fatigue, as I did a couple of years ago. This blog, begun as a kind of lark or experiment back in 2005, has become a kind of commitment. I've often told myself that even if not many people read it, it can still serve as a personal record--a kind of diary of my own thoughts, if not of my life exactly, during this time of creation.

Then there's the world falling about our ears: a worldwide financial meltdown and the wintry prospects beyond. It feels almost irresponsible not to address these grave and urgent matters--but what do I know about them? I suspect that even those in the know don't really know much about what's going on. As I write these words, the U.S. House of Representatives is still grappling with the $700- (or is it $800-) billion bailout bill for Wall Street. This is almost certainly a further waste of money--a mere playing for time in order to keep things from collapsing before the federal election. The legislation, at least as it exists till now, includes these words in its Section 8:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Is it constitutional to put decisions and individuals beyond the reach of law? That I don't know, but the fact that the framers of the bill are trying it tells me that we've got something that looks much like what happened at times of crisis in ancient Rome. It was the Romans who invented the office of the dictator: a person who could be invested with supreme command over the state and the army and who could rule by decree for a fixed period of exactly six months.

In Rome the dictatorship was a perfectly constitutional office that had its own defined limits. One could be appointed in times of grave stress or threat to the Republic, and he would lapse back to ordinary citizenship again when he had done his task and restored normalcy to the polity.

The U.S. of course has no such provision in its constitution. The ever-increasing tendency to place persons in authority beyond the reach of law or oversight is a sign of creeping tyranny, and the prospect of an unconstitutional dictatorship draws ever closer. Section 8 of this bill gives certain people great power while removing any accountability from them. It's a very bad sign when a preoccupation of the regime is how to escape prosecution for its actions.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his A Study of History, describes how every society goes through the transition from being guided by leaders--people who inspire others to follow them on the basis of their vision and personal qualities--to being dominated by rulers--those who have inherited the levers of power, but who lack the charisma of actual leaders. In the U.S., we've had the transition from leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who stirred and inspired their fellow citizens, to rulers such as George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, who have been preoccupied with world domination and shaping their own country into something closer to a police state.

As I've mentioned before, Toynbee also discusses the threefold progress of a typical Greek tragedy as it applies to the catastrophic undoing of such a ruling regime. Those three stages are koros, hubris, and ate. He translates these as "surfeit", "outrageous behavior", and "disaster". I believe we've seen plenty of the first two of these; now the third is looming into view.

The U.S. has the largest military in the world. They may feel they need it if large segments of its population, thrown out of their houses and their jobs, their retirements savings wiped out, become agitated. Voila: full-on military dictatorship.

Preposterous? Maybe. But maybe that's what they thought in Burma too. And I expect that real estate is still very affordable there.

epic musings

2008-09-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

Just as the truth about the future would be attained only if man were in touch with a knowledge wiser than his own, so the truth about the past could be preserved only on a like condition. Its human repositories, the poets, had (like the seers) their technical resources, their professional training; but vision of the past, like insight into the future, remained a mysterious faculty, only partially under its owner’s control, and dependent in the last resort on divine grace.

Thus E. R. Dodds in his excellent 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, which I'm still reading.

This extract is from chapter 3, "The Blessings of Madness", in which Dodds discusses the different kinds of madness as understood by the ancient Greeks. Some types of madness were known to be ordinary and pathological--disease in the same sense that the body can be diseased. But others were regarded as divine, and conferred special superhuman powers on those visited by these states.

Two of these forms of divine madness were conferred by Apollo and Dionysus. But a third was regarded as bestowed by the Muses; this form of "madness" was poetic inspiration. In contact with a Muse, the poet received special knowledge not available to anyone else, and was able to express this in his verse.

As Dodds points out, the epic poets, when they supplicated the Muse for inspiration, were looking not for the technical ability to express themselves, but for hidden factual knowledge of the past. In an era without recorded media, the all-seeing, all-remembering Muse was the repository of the truth about the past, and it was this precious truth that the epic poet needed above all in order to fulfill his task.

I find this idea fascinating and, yes, inspiring. At this stage in my own epic work, I feel that I understand exactly what my great forebears were asking for, and why.

The past is a great unknown, as is the future. We have memories of our own lives, but as psychology has shown, memories change. What we remember, if we remember, and if that memory has any relationship with fact at all, is colored and shaped by our need to account for the present as we understand it. Our personal memories are mainly a kind of personal mythology that explains and supports our current attitudes and actions. Very broadly, we remember what we want to remember--the way we want to remember it.

And when we look back to times before our personal memories, we move even further onto mythological ground. Textbooks of national history are notorious for showing an edited, self-serving view of the past. Their aim is to create generations of patriots.

The epic poet, then, prays to the Muse for the truth about the past. What he gets is what he gets--whatever she decides to give him, if anything.

Now we have a long tradition of recorded history, as well as an actual science of the past in archaeology. Does this mean the Muse is obsolete, retired?

I think not. For the poet--and here I mean poet in its broad literal sense of "maker"--is still a limited being, who has only so much time and energy in his mortal frame. Confronted with a sea of recorded information, how is he to find what he needs?

You can call it chance, or method, or association--but I think that a research process that relies only on these things will come up empty. Speaking for myself, I have a certain feeling of being guided. Not all the time--in fact, not usually. But nonetheless. And after all, it takes me time to collect and read through the material to which I'm guided. I just need to be nudged and steered a little from time to time. I do get these nudges, and they must come from somewhere.

The "unconscious" would be the usual explanation. But what is the unconscious? By definition it is the great unknown, what is outside the field of consciousness. Because we claim not to believe in gods, we take it to refer to essentially mental processes happening below the threshold of awareness. But the entire notion of an unconscious mental process is quite mysterious, if you think about it. And to the extent that it exhibits purpose and knowledge, well, then, it's all the more mysterious.

I say: the Muse is as the Muse does. The gift of Calliope, the Muse of epic, is not poetic prowess but knowledge. The epic poet knows things that other people don't--and then he tells them.

O Muse, thanks for your help thus far. Please don't abandon me now.

epics, holograms, and hell

2008-09-26T07:18:00.000-07:00

Writing, studying, thinking--these three converge for me. I keep a separate folder on the computer labeled Thinking, in which I have documents devoted to different topics that interest me. For example, one of these is "Literary Criticism", which I've set up to record any thoughts I might have on literature as an art form. Some of these Thinking documents I find myself copying and pasting into my Encyclopedia folder for The Mission. The compartments between my different creative and thinking activities are dissolving. Gradually it's all becoming one enterprise, involving my whole being.

This relates to the idea of the epic as a total form: an epic, in some sense, is a complete image of the world. The epic form places the maximum demand on the writer. It reflects the totality of his being, which in turn reflects the totality of the world he lives in. I think of a hologram. One of the properties of the hologram is that each piece of the whole contains all the information in the whole--just on a smaller scale. A hologram of, say, a car, can be cut up into little pieces, and each little piece will have the image of the whole car.

The epic is a hologram of the world as the writer understands it. Perhaps this could be said of every work, but the epic is specifically an effort to make this image as complete and deep as possible. The epic gives meaning to the existence of a nation--or of our whole species.

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Mark Musa's translation of Dante's Inferno. Excellent stuff. Quirky and weird, like all the greatest literature--but bold and brilliant. The Divine Comedy was Dante's effort at producing a total work, a complete image of the cosmos in all its significant features. All the levels are there, from the microcosm of the Pilgrim's soul to the mesocosm of his society to the macrocosm of the created universe. They are integrated and related. As Virgil leads him ever deeper down the trenches of the vast crater called Hell, centered under Jerusalem, Dante describes what he sees and feels with an awestruck but sober eye.

And 700 years later, he's still in print. Next up: Purgatory.

reading hevvy

2008-09-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

Just about all of my reading is done for a purpose. Only occasionally do I read a book for "general knowledge", and almost never do I read a book "for fun".

Sound dreary? It isn't. For one thing, life is short, and I don't really have enough hours in it to read all the purpose-driven material that I want. But for another, those "fun" things, to me, aren't fun. Before long my eyes glaze over and I find I'm not picking up that book any more to continue on with it. I'm back to a full slate of motivated, "serious" reading.

What was the last thing I read for fun? Trying to recall... Two or three years ago I would sometimes peruse the paperback racks at the library, looking for something I might find entertaining. Mainly I had no luck. The racks there were filled with novels from series that for the most part lacked the first volume (presumably it was always checked out).

I remember going on a little vacation with Kimmie and Robin back in 1990--something we very seldom ever did, partly due to lack of money. This was a relatively cheap getaway to the Gulf Islands nearby. We were going to stay in rustic little cabins, ride our bicycles, and just relax. I took along some light "summer" reading, the sci-fi novel Count Zero by William Gibson. It had been a while since I'd read any science fiction--a staple of my youth--and Gibson was its hottest practitioner at that time. Here was my chance to kick back and enjoy some escapist fare.

Sitting at a quiet table in a cabin on Mayne Island, while deer moved silently outside, eating the motel owner's flowers, I tucked in to Gibson's cyberpunk novel. I felt a bit of a buzz as I started, at the imaginative settings and his tough, cynical style, but before long it palled on me. I finished the book, but I was not drawn in and carried along by the current of story as I used to be as a boy. I wasn't able to fully buy into the characters or the situation, even though I really liked the idea of futuristic hacker-jockeys moving through a virtual-reality space, breaking into data banks (I think that's what was in the book). It seemed that sci-fi reading was something I could not go back to, any more than I could go back to playing with Hot Wheels or Lego. Had I become entertainment-proof?

Well, my reading may not be "fun", but I do enjoy it. To me, this is fun. And it's hard to engage me in a story. Mostly what I think is, "so what?" Of course, I'm writing a king-sized story of my own now--one that I intend to be readable by me or people like me (if any such exist). I need to be reading about stuff that matters, and therefore that's also what I need to be writing about.

So right now it's Dante's Inferno for me. Not "reading lite". Maybe I need my own marketing phrase--how about "reading hevvy"?

what and why

2008-09-22T07:01:00.000-07:00

Again I find myself sitting here for long minutes staring at the screen. What do I write about? What do I say?

Over the years I've said quite a bit in this blog, weighing in on various topics, trying to stay more or less based on the slow creation of my epic, but essaying many side-trips along the way.

My idea of myself as a writer is changing. When I started this blog in 2005 I still thought of myself as a more or less "normal" writer (if such an expression can be allowed): that is, as a member of a more or less well-defined category called writers. I figured that my thoughts, my methods, my difficulties might be more or less like those of others practicing my craft.

Now my feeling is more one of difference: how I am unlike others practicing a superficially similar craft. I keep thinking back to an observation made by Roger Penrose near the beginning of his excellent (and challenging) book The Emperor's New Mind, that he expected, when he was in university, that as he got ever deeper into his discipline of mathematics he would find he had more and more in common with his colleagues in that field. Instead, the opposite happened: as he got deeper in, he found he had less in common with his supposed colleagues, that his way of thinking was so different from others in his field that it was surprising that they could communicate at all.

And yet to outsiders, it would seem obvious that mathematicians would form a tight clique of those who, uniquely among humanity, could understand what they heck their members were talking about. The rest of us sure can't.

So it is, perhaps, with us all. The relentless differentiation of life means that we keep becoming more unique, more distinct, regardless of the groups or associations we belong to. Nothing can stop that. Perhaps it is a lifelong preparation for the solitude of death (counterpart to the solitude of birth).

The writer's task, perhaps, is to turn away from belonging and to use his medium--words--to communicate his uniqueness. A conundrum, for I've toyed often with this joke: "I'm unique--just like everyone else." We're all unique, and in that respect we're all the same.

Ah well. There is passion in me to do what I'm doing--so I'm doing it. What's difficult is to explain what I'm doing--or why. Maybe this blog will never do either of those things.

Same and Different

2008-09-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

In my thinking about various things, I arrive again and again at a basic conundrum of human experience: the Same and the Different.

Even in ancient times this question exercised philosophers. How do we understand the ideas of Same and Different? What makes something the Same as something else, and what makes it Different? I thought of doing a drawing or a painting with the title of "Same and Different": two identical eggs side by side. They're the same--but different.

Another way of presenting this same idea is the notion of Genus and Species. In the ancient, original sense, Genus was the category to which two individuals belonged--as, say, the Genus "egg" in my example--and the Species was the individual instance within the category--as the two individual eggs. Two Different individuals within the Same category. They're the Same--just Different.

Two other terms for Same and Different are Familiar and Strange. For something to be the Same, it must be Familiar: we must have a preexisting idea of it against which to compare it and note its Sameness. The Strange is Different from our familiar ideas. We recognize its novelty.

Every created work will be an amalgam of Familiar and Strange, Same and Different, Old and New. Familiar words in a Strange sequence, for example.

My first thought was about historical fiction: that it is a particular example of Same and Different. For, like, say, science fiction, it transports us to a world removed in time from our own: to a place none of us has been in our lifetime. In that sense it must be Strange and Different. But in that Strange and Different time, it contains people, things, situations, that are Familiar--the Same as what we recognize in our own lives now.

But it's not just historical fiction and science fiction that traffic in the Familiar and the Strange in this way--it's every work. An artist is exactly someone who assembles the Familiar and the Strange in a creative and novel way to evoke a sense of aesthetic enjoyment and meaning in a viewer or reader.

And hence, again, that excellent saying about high-quality writing: it makes the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. This is the ability to see (and represent) things with fresh, unprejudiced vision, with the eye of newness.

A historical project is simply one way of doing that. Right now, it's my way. Day in and day out, I journey through the Strange to find the Familiar in history--and finding the Familiar in history, recognize the Strange in today. My task is to share those insights.

vision returned

2008-09-17T07:40:00.000-07:00

Thank heavens! I dug into the Kaspersky User Forum and discovered how to unlock access to the site stats for my blog. I can see them again.

I discovered how much I rely on being able to get a sense of how many people are stopping by (I can see only a subset of visitors, due to various security settings on people's computers, and so on). Writing posts without any sense of audience, I find, is hard: it's hard to get motivated. It's like performing in front of a one-way window, where people can look in but I can't see out.

Will this get me writing more posts again? Stay stuned...

before the fall

2008-09-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

My research has me ranging over ideas far and wide. I'm still searching for the core ideas that are most relevant to my work. I can't really afford to pass over any that I discover along the way. Any of these nuggets may turn out to be gold.

As an example of how the flow of my mind works, this morning I was typing notes from my newly acquired book The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds, a famous work based on a series of lectures given by the Irish scholar in 1949. Chapter 1 is "Agamemnon's Apology", in which Dodds examines the psychological and spiritual factors at work in the Iliad when Agamemnon finally apologizes to Achilles for insulting him. In the course of the discussion Dodds talks about the Greek word ate, which he translates as "divine temptation or infatuation". Dodds sees this as a form of "psychic intervention": the sudden eruption into one's mind of a thought, idea, or impulse. If the thought, idea, or impulse is not in line with the thoughts, ideas, or impulses that one usually tends to have, then there is a strong sense that it is something alien to oneself, that it was "put there" by someone or something else--a god or a daemon.

But I recalled the term ate from another book, A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee. There he uses the term in his analysis of the phenomenon of militarism:

We may now go on to examine the active aberration described in the three Greek words koros, hubris, ate. Objectively koros means "surfeit," hubris "outrageous behavior," and ate "disaster." Subjectively koros means the psychological conditions of being spoilt by success; hubris means the consequent loss of mental and moral balance; and ate means the blind headstrong ungovernable impulse which sweeps an unbalanced soul into attempting the impossible. This active psychological catastrophe in three acts was the commonest theme in the 5th-century Athenian tragic drama. In Platonic language:

"If one sins against the laws of proportion and gives something too big to something too small to carry it--too big sails to too small a ship, too big meals to too small a body, too big powers to too small a soul--the result is bound to be a complete upset. In an outburst of hubris the overfed body will rush into sickness, while the jack-in-office will rush into the unrighteousness which hubris always breeds."

I felt a shudder as I read these words again, for they seem to be an apt description of our own times. Toynbee, writing in the 1940s, goes on to illustrate his point with the story of David and Goliath. The proud, overconfident Goliath complacently puts his trust in his past accomplishments and his reputation, as well as in his sheer size. A well-aimed stone takes him down.

The story is familiar to everyone, and yet we remain blind to the process by which we (some of us) personally morph from David into Goliath. Militarism is the path trodden by the Goliath of the U.S. Pentagon, and Canada is guilty of me-tooism with our adventure in Afghanistan. I'd like to think that the near-simultaneous federal elections in these two countries will make a difference, but alas, I fear not. It's not in Goliath's nature to see the error of his ways, until just a few seconds after it's too late.

zeitgeist

2008-09-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

I still can't view the stats page for my blog, which creates a curious feeling of being cut off. Sort of like a performer who can no longer see the audience.

I continue to research my work. If I am not an "insecure talent", in McKee's phrase, who spends all his time in research without ever actually getting down to the creative work, then I am indistinguishable from one.

But you have to go by your own sense of readiness. Only you can really tell when you're ready to write. Often not even you, for in my opinion all too many writers start writing before they're ready, and mediocrity is the result.

Now I'm enmeshed mainly in research on ancient Rome. I've always known I would have to dig into this topic, but had other fish to fry first. So it's not a surprise; I knew this was coming. And I don't want my own work to suffer from the defects I feel exist in many other works that deal with ancient Rome. Too often historical fiction suffers from an over-reliance on superficial details and texture, and does not find the deep feelings and ideas underlying past cultures. These, admittedly, are not easy to find, surfacing in one's mind, I think, only at the end of a long process of research--and not at all if you're not looking for them. But you're looking for a certain feeling of zeitgeist.

I'm now sensing that coming over my own mental horizon, which means I'm getting ready to write again...

genius

2008-09-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

Our word genius has an interesting background. In Latin it means "that which is just born". To the ancient Romans it meant the collection of traits and potentials that came into being or manifested at the birth of a person or anything else. They deified the concept as an entity that accompanied a man from birth to death (a woman was accompanied by a corresponding being called iuno--the same as the goddess Juno).

The genius was visualized in the form of a bearded snake that had its locus at the forehead. So it was an active, living principle, not the same as one's ego, but representing one's powers and one's destiny. The psychologist James Hillman has made use of this principle in his thinking, seeing in it a correspondence with other ideas, such as that of the guardian angel.

The image that just sprang to my mind was that of the strand of DNA that we regard as encoding our uniqueness as living beings. Being materialists, we tend to imagine this as a dumb thing, a record like a strip of magnetic tape that passively undergoes chemical operations in the course of our biological functioning.

But to me this is a silly way of looking at it. Our DNA is not dumb and inert; everything about it and its functioning suggests purpose and unbelievably brilliant design--a work of, yes, genius. Every one of us has a unique set of DNA, and its operation is purposeful, even relentless. This combination of uniqueness and forward-pushing purpose would be recognized by the Romans as one's genius.

We tend to reserve the word genius for exceptional people whose talents and achievements set them far apart from the norm. But even those who are closer to the norm are still unique, even if they are not famous.

Our task is to tune in to our uniqueness, and get out of its way. The serpent of our genius is always dragging us forward, and we spend much of our time, perhaps, fighting it mulishly, digging in our heels, perhaps out of a desire to be hitched to someone else's genius--to be doing things their way.

Possibly the people we call geniuses are simply those who don't do that. They have stopped fighting their genius--or they never started. Where their genius tugs them, they go. And when you run with your genius, you can run fast and far. It sees farther and knows more than we do. Why not just give in and enjoy the trip?

awake

2008-09-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

I'll quickly check in here. Again I got up in the night to do some reading. This is becoming a pattern. Part of the pattern is that when I return to bed (this morning at about 3:50) I lie awake, then eventually doze and have a dream that startles me awake again right away. The dreams are often about being intruded upon by strangers, or being spied on through windows by them--creepy.

However, there is no downside to reading as far as I can tell (if there is, I'm in big trouble). And time in the dead of night is truly free time.

A few days ago I updated my computer-security program (Kaspersky), and now, with better protection, I can't find a way to access the stats for who visits my blog--one of my main rewards for writing it. I'll try to puzzle that out.

Now: back to more research...

back to school

2008-09-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

I'll take a quick pause from my morning research to write a post.

Labor Day has just passed, and today is the universal day of "back to school"--a stronger feeling of New Year for me and many others than the holiday on 1 January. For all those years growing up life changed on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and one literally entered a "new year" of one's education.

It's a perfect back-to-school day here: a slight chill in the air, a faint mistiness in the morning air, and the green trees tinged with yellow and orange, the first blush of autumn.

Am I "back to school"? I suppose I never left it. Maybe I'm like the young Ebenezer Scrooge, the solitary boy left behind in the classroom, working while his mates were off home for the holiday. But I'm not here because I lack alternatives. I like what I'm doing, and feel vaguely anxious and off-course if I'm forced away from my solitary research. I'm motivated, because at some level I'm doing this not for myself but for others. Yes, solitary as I am, I'm working for others.

late-night reading

2008-08-28T07:19:00.001-07:00

The rain plops heavily outside again. A series of sirens has screamed by in the dark of morning.

I prepared for sleeplessness again last night, setting out my sweatpants and fleece top for easy access in the dark. It turned out I needed them: awake at 1:45, I rose again at about 2:30 to head downstairs to read. Might as well make the night productive. This time I opened The Lupercalia, a bound dissertation by a certain Alberta Mildred Franklin, written for her PhD at Columbia University in 1921. There was exactly one copy of this available via Abebooks. That was in Stockholm, Sweden. I bought it for just under 30 euros (including shipping).

I'm glad I did. I sat hunched over the coffee-table, highlighter in hand, flipping through the surprisingly well-made paper-bound document, and sipping a glass of cranberry juice. All quiet in the house; all quiet in the dark outside.

I read for just over an hour: wolf-cults in ancient Greece; wolf-cults in ancient Italy...

I felt fatigued but not especially sleepy. "So this is insomnia," I thought. I've never really had it before.

I crept back upstairs and back into bed. I mainly lay there, but did eventually drift in and out of a very light sleep. I know this because I had dreams. I noticed also the changes in the level of my consciousness as I lay in those hours. Thoughts and images would arise unbidden, spontaneously, and I knew that I was closer to sleep--and by then I had veered back to full wakefulness.

Now, I feel reasonably rested. I'll head on with the day, and see what it brings. One thing I can say: I'm excited by the ideas I'm researching and connecting. They may even be partly what is keeping me up nights.

sleeping, reading

2008-08-27T07:07:00.000-07:00

It's dark and rainy outside. Except for all the leaves on the shrubs and trees, it could be a November day. I like this kind of variety in the weather.

Yesterday I felt underslept after a semi-sleepless night. I'd got up at about 2:30 to come down to the living-room and read for an hour. Except for the lack of sleep, I kind of enjoy getting up in the middle of the night. All is quiet and dark, and there are no expectations on one at that time--it is truly your own time. Over two glasses of cranberry juice I read a book I bought at Chapters on the weekend: Caesar: The Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy. So far: excellent. I'm highlighting most of every page. Although the book is big, Goldsworthy wastes no time--every word tells. He's a very good writer of history.

Last night I took half a Sleep Aid, and slept very well. Indeed, I was greedy for more when the alarm went off at 5:30, but had to get up.

Now: on with the day. It is so dark out there it could almost be night, with the shrubs gleaming dully in the light of a full moon.

turtle-speak

2008-08-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager I was enthusiastic about chess. I'd always been fascinated by the game, and felt frustrated at age 6 or 7 when my father refused to teach it to me.

"You should learn checkers first," he said.

I was initiated into the game at age 8, I think, by my classmate Bill. I'm not sure whether he knew the game properly himself, but he got me started.

In 1972, when I was 13, the world was on fire over the apocalyptic (so the press would have had us think) world-championship match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik. Incredible though it may seem, each game in the 24-game series was front-page news worldwide. Now my father taught me how to read chess notation, and we would examine the games together--some of my favorite memories.

Over the next few years I attended a few tournaments and collected several books on chess. One of these books contained a chapter discussing the introduction and use of the clock in chess tournaments. In case you don't know, a chess clock is a twin set of clocks that measure the amount of time each player has spent deliberating over moves. In tournament and club play they are required, and they are often used in casual games by serious players as well. Nowadays these clocks are digital, but in my day the clocks were regular dial-clocks, actuated by buttons protruding from the top of the case. You'd make a move, punch your button, and this would stop your clock while simultaneously restarting your opponent's.

The time limit, called the "time control", is established in advance, and can be whatever the event organizers decree (or casual players agree on). I remember the time control for the Fischer-Spassky match: each player had 2.5 hours for the first 40 moves of a game, then 1 hour for each 16 moves thereafter. This is a relatively long and open-ended time control. By contrast, "rapid transit" chess is played with just 5 minutes for each player to finish the whole game.

And what happens if you exceed your time limit? Simple: you lose. If you're about to deliver checkmate, and your flag drops, you lose.

As my book pointed out, the clock was a lifesaver for chess. Without clocks, chess games would be reduced to a "turtle-paced inanity".

That phrase stuck in my mind. Recently it rose to the surface again, but not regarding chess, which I haven't played for years, but in regard to--you guessed it--my opus in progress. Trying to nap after lunch, or lying awake in the dark of night, the words haunt me: "turtle-paced inanity".

True, this is hare-speak. The turtle's pace suits the turtle. For the Preacher in Ecclesiastes it's a matter of painful irony that the race is not always to the swift, but Aesop provided a reason for that apparent anomaly in his fable of the tortoise and the hare. Hares are cocky and goof off.

But maybe that's just turtle-speak. No doubt turtles (or tortoises) have copies of Aesop tucked in their shells: consoling words for when the hares are sopping up the glory.

Turtle-paced inanity. The phrase has a rhythm that invites chanting. I'd better resist that--if I can.

welcome, stranger

2008-08-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

In the 1970s or perhaps the early 1980s there was a British documentary TV series called The Infinite Search, in which the presenter (forget who he was) visited practitioners and authorities of the various major religions of the world. In one of the episodes he visited a Zen monastery in Japan and interviewed the abbot, who could speak English.

At some point the presenter asked the Zen master what spiritual advice he could give to the Western viewers of the show. The Zen master answered, "I think it is important to know thyself."

In the words of my friend Brad, who first described this interview to me, it was a masterful reply. The dictum "know thyself" was of course the famous motto of the oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece, so with those two words the Zen master bridged East and West in one go. The deceptive simplicity of the advice makes it like a Zen koan in the sense that the more you reflect on it, the more provocative and bottomless it becomes.

According to Buddhist doctrine, of course, there is no self to "know"--but understanding this is far from easy. For from the Buddhist point of view, even though things are not real, neither do they lack reality.

In East and West, we're enjoined to investigate this unreality called our self and get to know it. The biggest obstacle is the complacency of thinking that we already know. Once you admit that you don't know, you open the door to the greatest mystery we can find. To a greater or lesser extent, we're all strangers to ourselves. And how do we treat strangers?

I feel strongly that my work relates to this quest, but I'm darned if I could tell you how.

free, classless, urbane

2008-08-21T07:01:00.000-07:00

Rain falls through the cool air. In the night, when I removed one of my earplugs, I heard the drumbeat of drops falling on a plastic fitting of the downspout system outside.

It was another wakeful night after 2:25. I reckon I need to return to my sometime practice of getting up to read. I might as well use the time to push my project ahead in some small way.

As it was, my mind was busy in the dark, zipping over wide terrain, not all of it negative. My thoughts had an excited, energetic quality, which made me sure that sleep was not to be forthcoming.

When I got up, I made coffee and read a couple of pages more of Livy's History of Rome (a downloaded public-domain version translated by D. Spillan and published in 1879). Then, unsure what notes I wanted to type, I got an intuitive desire to fetch Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism from my bookshelf. I'm working at learning to trust these hunches, so I got the book and flipped to its conclusion, where I had last left off typing a couple of months ago. I was thrilled with what I found waiting for me there.

One thing that struck me was this quotation from Matthew Arnold:

Culture seeks to do away with classes.

Needless to say, this is no Marxist sentiment. Frye followed it with this gloss:

The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane.

I relived my feeling of amazement when I first read that sentence. It could easily form the thesis of a book or a series of books--or the basis of a lifetime of contemplation.

I don't think I can even say much about it. I will only note that I regard Frye, along with Joseph Campbell, as a key inspiration for me in affirming the value of the arts and of artists. Many people value art and artists, but these men have been among the most articulate, for me, in accounting for exactly why art is so important to the human enterprise, and therefore why artists matter.

For much of our lives, we are not too different from chickens in a laboratory, pecking at the green triangle or the yellow star to make corn drop into a trough. Our emancipation from that condition depends, first and foremost, on artists. In that spirit, I press on.

restless mind

2008-08-19T07:22:00.000-07:00

I woke at 2:15 and never did go back to sleep. Too much to think about.

I've commented before about the difference in mentality, in emotionality, between day and night. I notice very strongly how differently I think and feel about things, even when fully conscious (that is, not just in the twilight of near-dreaming). At night my thoughts are much more emotionally flavored; my feelings are much stronger and more raw.

In astrology this is accounted for by the fact that the night is ruled by the Moon, which also rules our feelings.

One of my thoughts was that this is probably our mental state as we approach--and perhaps go through--death. It is likely a "nighttime" rather than a "daytime" experience, and we should prepare ourselves accordingly.

By that I mean that we should attend to those things in life that cause us to lose sleep, for they will very likely be the things troubling us on our deathbed.

Not all of my thoughts were painful, of course. A lot of what was keeping me awake was thoughts of fun and amusement--following interesting lines of inquiry and memory. I thought about astrology, for instance, and tussled with some exciting aspects of my current research.

There's lots to do for a restless mind.

what do I provide?

2008-08-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

It was a hot night. This morning it is gray and cooler; a mild rain started to fall as I took out the recycling just now. Kimmie's garden around the patio out my window is as lush and green as it's ever been.

Something's been bothering me about my blog. Well, maybe more than one thing. But what I'm thinking of is its title, which refers to a "historical novel". For some time now I realize that what I am in fact writing is an epic. Like most epics, it is also historical--but the genre is distinct. So, strictly speaking, this blog does not document the genesis of a historical novel (a phrase that I grabbed quickly from the air anyway when I set up the blog as an experiment in 2005). For that, I actually feel a little bit bad now, a little bit fraudulent (but only a little bit!).

Are blogs passe?

Probably not. They are, after all, a new force in journalism in the most basic sense.

But when I read the book Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish, a text on web copywriting, I realized that she was right: people on the Web are seeking information. The task of a website, including a blog, is to provide this information as quickly, clearly, and easily as possible.

The information this blog is intended to provide is about the experience of writing a particular novel--and many issues ancillary to that. But many people land here in search of other things, such as the word-counts of certain novels or the significance of hermaphrodites in dreams. While I hope they regard whatever they find here as helpful, I'm not an authority on those topics (although my novel word-counts are probably as good as anyone's back-of-envelope calculations), and it bothers me a little bit that I might not be providing high-quality information on anything except, well, my opinions and my inner state generally.

It doesn't bother me too much (I'm offering up these words for free, after all--take 'em or leave 'em). But a fairly large part of me is keen on accuracy and integrity.

In a way, I'm surprised still to be writing this blog three years on. Mind you, I seldom write in my offline journal nowadays; so this is it. Such as it is, this is the document of my life. That is the information I'm providing, whether it's sought or not.

the long stages of completion

2008-08-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

My effort at this long and difficult project has fallen naturally into stages. I refer not to stages of completion, but stages of kinds of effort, or stages of emotional attitude--something like that.

There was a years-long gestation period before I regarded this book as begun. During that time I was searching for the story I wanted to write. I didn't know where or when the story would be located, or who its characters would be. But I was excited by certain ideas, certain trains of thought, and I knew that I wanted to write about those things.

I regard the actual beginning or birth of the project as having happened in 2002 while I was temporarily a monk at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton. If I look through my papers I may be able to come up with the exact date. It was probably about April. I discovered what I felt was the beginning of my story: the historical scene of the cremation of the decapitated corpse of Pompey the Great on a deserted beach in Egypt.

How excited I was. I would spend Saturday mornings--our open day at the Abbey--in the library, writing notes for my story. In fact, I couldn't resist starting to write the story itself, even though I knew that it was vastly premature to do so. I just had to do it--I was that excited by it.

When I returned home from the Abbey that August, ahead of schedule due to a ruptured Achilles tendon, I spent my days sitting in my foot-cast in the living-room, writing in my notes-binder and poring through research-books. Having begun with a handwritten process at the Abbey, where I had no computer, I continued in the same vein, and did not think about starting to type my notes on the PC. In part it this was also due to the fact that going up and down stairs was a bit inconvenient.

I wrote hundreds of pages of longhand notes before I started typing notes directly onto the computer. Those sunny days in the living-room were mainly wonderful, my mind restlessly pushing forward, solving problem after problem: historical contradictions, story problems.

The fiery passion of the beginning gradually died back to something more like glowing charcoals. With my outline still not really complete I decided to start writing my story, I think in 2004, because I was afraid of delaying any further. Working with history--actual historical events, not merely the backdrop of a period--forces constraints on the story and presents and severe story problems. My aim is to hug as closely to historical accuracy as possible, to take zero liberties. The resulting story is the trail of the struggle between fact and imagination.

I'm still going. I've settled into my pace for the long haul. As with running, my pace is a plodding one. I look out the kitchen window at the path on the boulevard and see young runners running smartly along it at a clip that, to me, looks like a sprint. I sigh and think, "That's not me."

I'm still waiting for the stage to arrive when I've locked on my story--when I know exactly what it is, and what it means. I'm still not there, and this I find frustrating at such a late date. My background reading is not slowing up; it might even be increasing. I have a load of new books set to arrive as my researches continue to carry me in still more directions.

It's like a boundary commission. I'm walking through wilderness with the aim of outlining a new territory. Someone's got to cover every meter of the border of the territory, no matter how large it is and no matter what kind of wild uncharted country it passes through. The space must be marked out.

I'm still engaged with that. My country is still coming to birth.

at my post

2008-08-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

Back (or still) at my post.

Ah, yes, my post: here at this computer, at this desk. I call it "desk", but in fact it is a white melamine Scandinavian-style kitchen-table that Kimmie bought in 1985 when she was still single and living in an apartment. We were going out together and I had not yet moved in with her. I scolded her at the time for having lugged the table up the apartment-building's stairs by herself. She should have got me to do that--or at least got me to help her. But Kimmie, born in the year of the horse, is accustomed to carrying loads and thinks nothing of it. (I'm year of the dog--a harmonious companion of the horse, according to the Chinese texts.)

When we bought this townhouse in 1987, we also bought a pine table and chairs to serve as our dining suite, then situated immediately by the living-room, indeed as part of the same space. The white table was moved to the kitchen to function as the everyday table at which we ate. In late 1989, when Warren and I were trying to come up with TV shows after our success with "What's Wrong with Neil?", we bought a PC together--an early number with a text-only, black-and-white screen--and set it up here in my office. I needed a table for it, so I executed a plan Kimmie and I had been talking about, and moved the Ikea dining-furniture into the carpeted space adjoining the kitchen, clearing the living-room space for other uses, and brought the white table downstairs.

Kimmie was irritated that I'd stolen the white table, but I pointed out that I needed a table, it was the perfect size and type for my needs, and with our new dining configuration there was nowhere to put the white table in any case. I wasn't about to buy a new table, only to store the white one in the windowless concrete space of our storage-room. She was actually delighted with the change in the upstairs configuration, so quickly got over her loss.

The old Packard-Bell computer I finally replaced in December 1998 with a Dell that had an actual color monitor and graphical user interface. (I'd touched my first computer mouse in 1996 when I worked as a mail clerk at an ICBC claim center.) Since then I've become reasonably proficient in using a personal computer.

But I still have the old white table that Kimmie bought when we were first going out. It's my post--I'm at it.

write unto others

2008-08-08T06:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch at my mother's house--a lovely quiet place in Cove Cliff. As usual, we talked about writing afterwards. Since she's working on a memoir, we looked at the opening sentences, paragraphs, and pages of a number of memoirs that she has. How successful have these writers been in launching their stories?

We agreed that the best opener was from A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca:

When I was a boy, my father always wore a pained expression and kept his head down, as if he couldn't shake what was bothering him.

The author opens up with a telling and well-observed fact that is important to his story. He expresses it simply and clearly, without resorting to tricks or come-ons. He has something significant to say, and is not embarrassed or coy about getting to the point. In this he treats his reader with respect, as an equal, as someone whose time and attention he does not want to waste. In this case I've also read the rest of the book, and Baca delivers the goods: a chilling tale of poverty, crime, and punishment that is all the more gripping because it's his own life-story.

One interesting problem, which I noticed for the first time yesterday, is that memoir-writers, in addition to falling prey to the usual flaws of gimmicky openers and window-dressing prologues, tend to overdo description. As I thought about it, I realized the cause.

The memoir-writer in some ways has the opposite difficulty of the fiction-writer: while the fiction-writer is often in the situation of trying to pump from a dry well--coming up with enough details to make a scene vivid--the memoir-writer has a superabundance of material to choose from. If you have a good memory, any scene from your life is full of details: the specific, life-giving touches that make an image real. It's hard to resist putting lots of these in. But too many details clutter and clog a story, just as too few make it seem dry and lifeless. In the case of memoir, the writer needs to show restraint, and choose only the most telling details for inclusion.

I suspect that one reason that this is hard to do is because there is a feeling that if a good image is not used, it is being wasted: left in one's memory as a private thing, and not shared with the world. Your precious memory will sink to oblivion, unredeemed.

Another possible cause is a feeling of insecurity about one's story. If the story is not strong and clear, it might be tempting to dally with description.

Probably a good discipline to adopt would be that suggested by Stephen King: to come up with three telling images of, say, your setting, and to use those and only those.

This is one area in which screenwriters may have an advantage. In a screenplay, the description has to be kept to a bare minimum. It is held in check by the rule that each page of script must correspond to one minute of finished film. Each eighth of a page is about 7 or 8 seconds of story-time. If you've spent that much space describing the subject of a shot, you're implying an 8-second shot--an eternity of film-time. So in a screenplay, the long, loving description has to be chopped down to a few punchy, suggestive words. I recall this example from a script, in which the hero, a hard-bitten cop I think, is introduced:

His face is a roadmap of places you don' t want to go.

In a script, the words have to evoke an image in the reader's mind, and also provide a handle for an actor to start building a performance on. In prose, of course, you have more leeway. But it might be good discipline to pretend you don't.

The duty of the writer is to offer the reader only the best, the choicest things. It's the Golden Rule: write unto others as thou wouldst be written unto.

researching with a machete

2008-08-07T07:04:00.000-07:00

Bit of a late start today, since we both drifted off after the alarm rang at 5:30. A hot night, and as usual now, trouble with staying asleep through it.

Even my basement office feels warm. But a soft cool breath of air comes through the window, along with the far-off sounds of impatiently accelerating motors.

I toil on at the chapter I'm currently numbering 32. No actual prose yet, but the notes documents are ballooning to dozens of pages. I'm not even exactly sure what I'm looking for, but I'll know when I find it. I'm working my way through images, objects, symbols. I'm still looking for my core images; at this late date I still have not found them, and that means I still don't know exactly what my story is about.

When you know exactly what you're writing about, your writing loses its arbitrary quality and takes on purpose. I know the feeling of arbitrariness well; many times I've had the feeling, while writing, that I'm just pulling any old thing out of the air to stick in my scene or my description. This is inevitable when you don't have a clear sense of the meaning of your story--and probably is a universal feature of first drafts. One of the greatest pleasures of doing a second draft is the feeling of confidence in removing material that you now know does not belong. This you can do because you now know what your story is about. The feeling of not really knowing--the feeling I have now, and have had for the past several years--is one of unease and anxiety, at least for me. You can only just keep going along, doing your best.

That said, I find the actual search for key images and ideas fun. Yesterday I was digging into Mount Etna in Sicily and Mount Parnassus in Greece--both said to be the place where the ark of Deucalion (the Greek Noah) came to rest after the Flood. Mount Parnassus is the peak that looms over Delphi with its oracle; it is sacred to Apollo and the Muses, among other things. Because the Muses were said to live there, the name Parnassus has been associated with artistic creation throughout Western history; references to it pop up in the work of artists like Nicolas Poussin and writers like Louisa May Alcott.

I prowl from my computer to my bookshelves, taking out copies of The Greek Myths by Robert Graves and A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E. Cirlot. I read Wikipedia articles, and paste parts of them into my research files. And I type my thoughts as I go, under today's dateline. I read through my earlier notes, highlighting potentially significant or usable ideas I find there.

In short: I'm still at the "machete" stage: cutting my way into the jungle of the unknown. Eventually it will be a highway and the journey will look easy.

But looks can be deceiving...

on (mis)guidance

2008-08-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

A couple of days "off". We just passed the B.C. Day long weekend, and I extended that by a day yesterday, at least as far as posting to this blog goes. Now I'm back at it.

A writer, like any other artist, any other worker for that matter, needs to know how to go about the task. There seem to be three basic components to this knowledge: tools (alphabet, words, grammar); instruction (guidance from the experienced practitioner); and examples (existing written works).

In my experience, one needs to be careful about what instruction to accept. There are "experts" in the field who will steer you wrong--not intentionally, but simply because their advice is not appropriate for you. I think about reading advice articles by literary agents, in which some stressed the importance of "writing for the market"--that is, writing things that are similar to what is selling to publishers at the moment. This might be OK advice for certain kinds of writers, but it is poison for others, in my opinion. If you follow wrong advice, it's like following wrong directions to your destination: the more time you spend following it, the farther off course you are.

The lesson, as far as I'm concerned, is this. When it comes to advice, disregard the supposed authority of the dispenser of it, and pay attention to how the advice makes you feel. Does it inspire you? Do you get a "yes" feeling somewhere in your core? Is the person giving voice to a feeling you already had in you anyway? If so, then it's probably good advice for you, and you should take it.

On Saturday night Kimmie and I watched the movie Toy Story again (for, I think, the fourth time). On our new digital TV it was especially good. As with all high-quality movies, I enjoyed it more this time than on previous viewings. After the movie we watched a couple of the accompanying "special features", one of which was a gathering of the four main guys on the creative team, 10 years after the movie's release (which was in 1995). I felt a real kinship with these guys, and their experiences echoed some of my own from my television days.

Unlike live-action films, animated movies are not simply written; the original words are sketched out as pictures before the "story" is regarded as created. Preliminary animations are done of characters and scenes, to try things out. The animators in this case, working for Pixar, were making the movie for Disney. As they developed their script and characters, Disney executives would review the work and give them "notes" (industry term for feedback). The animators, most of whom were working on their first feature film, diligently tried to follow the advice they received. When the time came to screen a preliminary version of the show for the executives, the film fell flat. It was unfunny and uninvolving.

The executives realized that a drastic cure was needed: the filmmakers would have to go over to Disney, where they could be supervised more closely by the executives. The director, John Lasseter, realizing that this would be the death of their project, begged for two weeks in which he and his team could turn the show around on their own. The execs, realizing that this was impossible, indulged him.

The team worked frantically for two weeks. They were going to roll the dice, and this time, do it "our way". They still made use of the feedback they'd gotten so far, but used it critically, following only those tips that they really agreed with. This is what reminded me of working on The Odyssey. Warren and I developed our own policy with regard to network "notes": if a suggestion improved a script, write it in. If it made no difference to the script, write it in (humor them). But if we felt that a suggested change was for the worse, we would ignore it or, if necessary, fight back.

You can guess the outcome. In two weeks the Toy Story team delivered a much snappier, funnier, more original prototype, and earned the right to keep working on their movie in their own studio. The resulting movie of course was a major hit.

An artist in training needs guidance and teaching, but at the same time, an artist must be free of authority, which smothers creativity and originality. It's a difficult balance, I think--but it must be found.

the artist as worrier

2008-08-01T06:58:00.000-07:00

I still wake up in the middle of the night (at 3:50 this morning) and worry about my project (among other things). During the day I don't worry about it too much; I continue on with what I'm doing and let it take its course. But at night, lying passively in the dark, I worry.

What exactly do I worry about? I worry mainly that my idea is unworkable and that I'll lose inspiration with it and not finish it. Or that I will finish it but be unable to find anyone to publish it, forcing me to publish it myself. Thus the end of one Sisyphian task merges into the beginning of another.

I worry that I won't be able to solve my story problems, or to make my work cohere into something unified. That I won't be able to find what it is I'm truly trying to say, and thus won't be able to tell what belongs in my story and what doesn't.

I worry about how fast the years are going by now, and how little I seem to be able to get done each day, each year. They zip by like telephone poles on a train-ride. How many poles do I have left before the trip ends? How can I possibly be spending so much time on one project? What's wrong with me?

I sometimes feel at night the way I did as a boy in school, when I'd wake up and feel dread about some project that was coming due, and which I was procrastinating on finishing (or starting). In the day it didn't seem to bother me enough to get going on it, but at night I would have a knot of worry in my gut, knowing that the consequences of noncompletion would be unpleasant. I felt unfree.

Back then I didn't want to do their stupid assignments. I wanted to do my own projects, my own thing. But now I am doing my own project, my own thing--and still I lie awake at night, sweating it out.

Now, in the (underslept) light of day, I tell myself that this is the price of originality. If I were working on a "normal" project, that is, one that resembled other projects already out there, I would be able to plan its completion in a rational way. You're building a recognizable thing using a tested approach; you have a reasonable ETA for the whole thing. "This humorous vampire novel should take about eight months to write."

For this alien behemoth gestating in the uterus of my hard-drive, who knows.

I don't, and it worries me.

happiness and unhappiness

2008-07-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

What would a "happy" life look like for me?

I'm not sure but I'm probably living it.

All of life is a tension of opposites, is it not? Happiness exists only in contradistinction to its opposite, unhappiness (or misery or sorrow or suffering). Only when the opposites are in fairly close proximity do we feel the intensity of one or the other. If you've had a biopsy for a suspected cancer, you may be waiting for the result with feelings of anxiety, even dread. When it comes back negative, you feel a rush of relief and joy. For a while, life seems rich and wonderful--a gift. But the intensity of contrast wears off as a function of time, and you return to your previous state of tension along the happiness-unhappiness axis.

Writers, like other people, tend to measure success in terms of social rewards such as prestige and earnings. But if an intelligent, objective person looks at those rewards carefully, there is not much to them. I think about, say, Conrad Black, the once-Canadian tycoon now languishing in hoosegow in Florida. Wealthy, prominent, and successful by just about any social yardstick except his own, he sought, Gatsby-like, to attain to some limit or singularity of social success and glamor, to "suck on the pap of wonder" (I think those were Fitzgerald's words) by becoming a British lord and joining the "real" nobility.

It was not to be. Or rather, it was--but then ended, spectacularly and suddenly, generating a contrast-experience in the downward direction.

The psychologist Victor Frankl says that life does not provide the answers; life asks the questions, and we provide the answers. Our lives, our living situations, are, basically, our answer--so far--to the questions put to us by life. Each problem or dilemma in life is another question, and our response is our answer to that question.

Whatever my feelings about toiling in obscurity, this toil and this obscurity are the result of choices I have made--my answers to the questions set by my life. If I don't like that, then I have a new question to answer. But my Buddhist training tells me to have caution. The restless search for a better deal in life is the hallmark of the human realm, and is itself a manifestation of suffering--of living in samsara.

The best definition of samsara that I've come across is "wanting things to be other than they are". Here's something to try: if you find yourself wishing things were other than they are, take a deliberate break from that way of thinking. For a few moments, just accept the way things are and pay attention to your surroundings. Notice then how your mind feels. To the extent that you can do this, you have had a taste of nirvana.

For me, to be in a state of tension between happiness and unhappiness is the way things are. Well, why not?

the writer as soldier

2008-07-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

George Orwell likened writing a novel to going through a prolonged illness. Another analogy has just come to me: fighting a war.

The image is not natural for me, since I am a peacenik, convinced that war is only ever a creator of problems, not a solver of them. Indeed to me, violence is a synonym for injustice.

However, the image floated to my mind, so I believe that there must be a connection (trusting my metaphoric powers). In a war, no matter how strong or powerful you are, success is not assured. The great theoretician of war, Carl von Clausewitz, admitted that as soon as you embark on a war, things become unpredictable. Even as you exert yourself to the utmost, you are not the master of your destiny, since so many complex and unknowable factors come into play. To some extent you're always rolling the dice.

Then there's the fact that a war is not just one thing, but a whole--often unexpected--series of campaigns and battles. You might win a brilliant victory in some battle, only to find yourself faced with the same giant task of trying to win the war. In each battle, victory is necessary but not sufficient. You've got to keep slogging on after it's over, whether you win or lose this one engagement.

And there's no fixed term. Unlike a sporting event, in which, even if things are going miserably, you can take solace in the knowledge that the final whistle will eventually blow and you can go home, a war is of no fixed duration. History is dotted with struggles with names like The Hundred Years' War. How many would be able to go through with a war if they knew that that would be its eventual title? Depressing.

Then there's the fact that everyone always goes to war certain of their own victory. But of course, the result is often defeat. Even the eventual "winner" can take a heckuva a pounding on the way. Indeed, most victories are more or less Pyrrhic, with the survivors trying to take comfort in the idea that their loved ones' deaths were justified by rescuing some abstract noun or other ("freedom", "democracy"). For people burying family members, or merely taking delivery of a dog-tag at the front door, it's cold comfort.

Writing a novel, of course, is not such serious business. But on a personal, individual scale, it brings comparable feelings into play. In a certain sense you're picking a fight with something that fights back, and success, no matter how you define it, is far from assured. And no matter how well any one battle goes--and often they don't go well--you know there are a large number of them still remaining. You strategize and discipline yourself. You need courage and have to be prepared for pain--perhaps lots of it. And, win or lose, you'll be shedding tears before it's over.

Right: on with the fight.

the Muse and I

2008-07-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

All right. If this blog is supposed to be about the process of writing this work, then what can I say about where I'm at right now?

I'm going through the process that has evolved, seemingly of itself, in the long course of working on this project. I'm in the midst of trying to work out the chapter that, for now, I'm numbering 32. (My chapter numbers--and the number of chapters--will change in the next draft; this is one of the few things I'm sure of.) The notes document now runs to 32 pages as well.

The first and best metaphor that springs to mind is that of digging. I ask myself questions and try to come up with answers. Whether the questions are really useful or germane--never mind the answers--is not clear. They are just what come to mind in my effort to discover where I'm going.

I have a rough idea of where I'm supposed to go--that's laid out in my outline, the blueprint I developed in the earlier, happier days of 2002-03. But sometimes that outline is vague (such a huge job), and often it's hard to engineer the events that will bring about the steps required in the outline. Then again, sometimes the outline itself needs to be changed: I come up with actual new ideas for how to turn my story. In a way, that's the most exciting part of this first-draft process, even as it creates anxiety that my whole story might shift out of its current form and turn into something else--something that will take yet more years of my life to write.

Ah, anxiety, my old friend. Many fears attend working on a project like this (all right, on this project--there are no others "like" this). The greatest fear is of not finishing it, which might happen for any of a number of reasons, the most pleasant of which would be my own death. Other reasons would be physical or mental incapacity of one kind or another, including the "incapacity" of losing inspiration.

And now it dawns on me that this is the real reason that epic writers of the past have invoked the Muse at the beginning of their works. Not for quality of inspiration, even though that is how they couch their terms: "Help me, O Muse, find adequate words..." But for quantity: "Help me, O Muse, find the creative stamina to reach the end of this work..." I can't speak for other epic writers, but that's what this one needs. And for this I really do pray. And I believe that the Muse so far is helping me. Through the umbilicus that attaches us she sends the inspiration that nourishes me through these long seasons of effort.

For this I thank her. Oh yes indeed. Thank you, O Muse. Please don't let me down. I will keep at it and offer the result, good bad or indifferent, to you. It is yours before it is anyone else's.

making it good

2008-07-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

What makes a piece of writing good? We always know how much we're enjoying something that we're reading, but it's hard to define what makes a written work enjoyable.

Establishing the criteria of quality in writing has been the business of literary critics ever since that job function has existed. But according to Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, it is actually impossible to formulate "rules" of literary quality. If I read him correctly, he's saying that although we have a direct experience of the superior quality of one work over another, we can never finally say exactly why it is better. (Indeed, it was partly for this reason that he wanted to get away from the whole project of comparing the merits of various literary works, and see rather whether he could outline a "science" of literary criticism based on the purely objective aspects of literature--things that can be known.)

That may be OK for a literary critic, but a practicing writer does need practical guidance in how to tell good from bad, and how to steer more toward the former than the latter.

Speaking for myself, I would say that I'm guided, as a reader and therefore as a writer, by the desire to experience certain kinds of feelings while reading. Without going into the how of it, I'm seeking a kind of engaged interest--something that holds my attention and, in a certain way, compels my assent. I think that in order for this to happen, the writer's understanding of the world, people, and events must be similar to my own. I'm disengaged or put off if, while reading, I think, "That's not how the world works; that's not how people are; that's not how things happen."

I've mentioned before that the best writers make the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. This perhaps is the heart of the matter for literature. The task is to create a work in which strangeness and familiarity are laminated together in endless tight layers, like the layers of hard and supple steel in a samurai sword. The more strange a work is in some respects--the fanciful world of Harry Potter, say--the more it needs to be homey and familiar in others, such as in the everyday interactions of its characters. The more quotidian the setting and its people, the more strange and mysterious the underlying universe of the story--and here I think of James Joyce and his Dubliners.

Different readers like different things. We have different issues, different interests, different life experience. Certain writers "speak" to me more than other ones do--and the same will be true of you.

As I've said many times before, I have a hard time now finding fiction that I can enjoy. For whatever reason, writers are not speaking to me. So I'm setting out to write the book I can enjoy reading. Will others enjoy it? Who knows. There are a lot of hurdles to get over before I can find that out.

the solitude of uniqueness

2008-07-23T07:13:00.000-07:00

Again I find myself staring at this screen, wondering what to write about.

What's my problem? I'm a writer, aren't I?

I might be "a" writer, but I am coming to feel that what I'm working on is something that is outside the bounds of normality, even by writing's standards. I feel a bit like someone who's brought a plesiosaur to a pet show. What events do I enter it in? What category to I put it in? How do I fill out my entry card? There is a sense of the grotesque, and a general feeling of what's he doing here? That my very presence, in some sense, is spoiling everyone's fun.

No, of course I'm not spoiling anyone's fun. But gradually I feel myself taking on more qualities of alienation: that my experience and my effort are taking me beyond the bounds of what other people can really grasp.

I think about the survivors of the true-life story that was the basis for Melville's novel Moby-Dick. In a rare display of fury, a sperm whale really did turn on a whaling ship in the South Pacific and stave in its hull, sending it to the bottom. The surviving crew were left in two lifeboats more than 1,000 miles from land. They became separated, and one boat was never heard from again. The other boat eventually beached on South America with a few survivors, but only after an excruciating ordeal that involved being baked alive under the sun, the madness induced by drinking sea-water, and cannibalism.

Who could ever really understand the extremity of what those men went through?

The alienation of an extreme experience is perhaps just a metaphor for life. Naked and alone we arrive on planet Earth for our journey; naked and alone we depart. Alienation, perhaps, is our basic condition, and all of our societies, our pet shows, are just so many efforts to cheer ourselves up.

No, I'm not depressed. But I am feeling a new and greater sense of the solitude of uniqueness.

back to work

2008-07-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

Back from "vacation".

Kimmie has had a week off, and today returns to the Corporation to resume the stresses of contract development, her new job. I too took a week "off".

What does that mean in my case? First of all: no waking to an alarm-clock. This morning the alarm was again set to ring at 5:30, but Kimmie's bedside clock lay silent through the past week. That meant sleeping in till 7:00 each morning, and therefore a day shaped differently from the usual "work" day.

I would still key my research notes over morning coffee--what else would I do? I enjoy that, and it gives a feeling of forward motion, however spurious.

The real "vacation" lay in not opening up my chapter-notes to struggle with my story. This is the daunting and anxiety-producing part of the work, and therefore the part from which I seek any excuse to avoid--including the excuse of being on "vacation". For a week I gave myself permission to leave the beast alone.

As usual we stayed close to home, except for an overnight trip to Vancouver Island to visit my father (very nice, and with excellent dining as always). We did some neighborhood walks and bought Kimmie a dress-form at Dressew downtown for her birthday--and Kimmie did spend plenty of time in her "mad scientist's lab" of sewing creations in Robin's old bedroom, in the summer heat and with the noise of traffic blasting in the open window from Keith Road.

Now it's time to take up cudgels again and measure my powers against the waiting monster of my work. O terrible foe.

vacationland

2008-07-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

Kimmie is taking this week off, so I will likely take a break from blogging, to enjoy a freedom from the usual routine.

Summer has hit Vancouver full-on: it's been hot and sunny and clear. Twilights have settled into soft blues and mauves, with the sounds of swishing leaves and people's laughter on the streets.

nonacademics

2008-07-10T07:06:00.000-07:00

These days my "writing" consists of reading and typing the resulting notes. My method I suppose is not much different from what it would be if I were writing a work of nonfiction: reading, highlighting, typing. Occasionally my research sparks ideas for my story, and I type these in suitable story-related documents. I shift back and forth between reading my research works and musing on their implications for my story. I can only say that to me, this feels productive.

I follow specific lines of investigation. For a number of reasons my research right now has led me to look into the mythology surrounding Mount Lycaon in Arcadia--the place where the god Pan was allegedly born, where Zeus allegedly turned a king into the first werewolf, and where the Greek version of the Flood originated. My text right now is The White Goddess by Robert Graves, a treasure-house of deeply researched and interconnected mythological lore.

Taking a glance at the reviews on Amazon.com, I see that The White Goddess has become somewhat uncool--although it still has its passionate fans. Even those fans seem to feel the need to make excuses for what they fear is its political incorrectness and lack of concurrence with current scholarship.

Personally, I would never dare to presume to make excuses for a man of such evident and outstanding genius. True, he's an outlier: a poet, a maverick. He was not a professional academic--and was proud of that fact. He spent only a brief interval of his life teaching at a university in, I believe, Egypt; the rest of his life he spent as a professional writer.

Bravo, I say.

Graves had access to resources that academics lack. Not only was he fully conversant with ancient Greek and Latin, he had read, apparently, every surviving classical work in its original language up to the Byzantine era. He had tremendous powers of deduction and inference, as well as a profound knowledge of the natural, climatic, and folkloric aspects of Europe and especially the Mediterranean world.

But beyond these things he had a conviction in his vocation as a poet, which placed him in a fraternity not with academics, but with poets of all ages--including the poets responsible for the myths of the ancient world. Graves trusted his own poetic instincts to tell him how the poets of old connected their images and their meanings. You can't annotate that with a footnote. The plausibility or authenticity of the connection lies in its intrinsic power--in whether it awakens something in the reader or listener.

Yes, I can understand how, for academics, Graves constitutes a kind of no-go zone. But academics don't have a monopoly on knowledge, still less on history, culture, or myth. Graves was writing, first of all, for fellow poets: those entrusted with making use of the powerful images and their interconnections. And it is in that role that I approach his work.

And as I reread The White Goddess, I too am glad that I'm not an academic.

quiet life

2008-07-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

It's hard to describe the writing process as I'm now practicing it. There is a feeling of tunneling in, digging into the ideas and characters that I've got, searching for a nucleus, for the linkages.

Research is continuous. In some ways I feel that a work of fiction or drama is as much a matter of research as any work of nonfiction, or even of science. And, in many ways, the more fanciful your story, the more its underlying network of consistent relationships, of rules, needs to be solid and worked out. Somewhere in the mysterious chemistry of fact and fancy emerges the special cocktail of familiarity and strangeness that is a story. A good story, anyway.

Summer heat is upon us. Right now (7:26 a.m.) the green central area between our building and the buildings next door is still in shade. The sun strikes the lane beyond the low canyon between our buildings, and the sky is clear blue over the gray expanse of the long roof across the lane. It is quiet except for the whir of two fans in my computer.

I wanted a quiet life in which to think and write, and, outwardly, I've got it.

laboring in freedom

2008-07-07T07:05:00.000-07:00

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Thus spake Einstein. (I forget now where I found that quote; I copied it into a document I have for recording quotes.) I've mentioned it before, but it's one that I keep returning to in my mind.

I realize that I place tremendous importance on this idea of laboring in freedom. Indeed, I've bet my whole life on it.

What it means to me is that one' s work is generated spontaneously from within, and not in response to outward inducements from others. Not as an assignment given by someone else, not in response to the supposed cravings of the "market", not in order to gain the approval of society or any subset of it. Instead, one becomes inspired by one's own relationship with something--an idea, a possibility--and, with the energy of this inspiration, which is the same thing as enthusiasm, one works to realize the inspiration.

This can never be a practical decision. By its nature it is the opposite of practical: it is not a means to realize some near-term worldly or economic end. For those of us who have a worldly, practical nature, this disconnect produces anxiety.

At least, that's how I feel. The worldly part of me--which is not a small part--looks on with a kind of horrified fascination at the "enthusiastic" or creative part of me, the part that is devoted to an inspired task and doesn't give a damn about anything else. The worldly part finds itself in the position of having to think of ways to sustain the inspired part, which doesn't seem to care or even notice whether it's being sustained or not.

"When's this thing going to be done?" Worldly Part says.

"Huh?" says Inspired Part, not looking up.

In the earlier part of my adulthood, the worldly part of myself tried to be in control. It saw itself as the manager of the whole system, and the inspired part as subordinate. Creativity was to be put in the service of worldly aims.

That was the wrong way around. Whatever feelings of confidence or security may have come from it were illusory. I may not have felt direct anxiety over my creative life--but I should have. (Indeed, I did have a lot of anxiety, and I reckon that my creative life was possibly one of its chief bases.)

Now I do have worldly anxiety: I worry about my long labor at such a vast creative project. Like the audience in a good movie, I wonder, "How's this going to turn out?"

I don't know. It's not a script I've written. I'm playing my part, and hoping for the best.

another day

2008-07-04T06:53:00.000-07:00

I've been taking it easy, blogwise. Kimmie took an extra-long weekend over Canada Day (and had dental surgery on Wednesday), and I fell in with vacation mode alongside.

But even in vacation mode I keep on reading, researching. It can never be "enough", except in the sense that there comes a point when I feel willing to dare writing more of my story based on what I've learned so far. The creative urge pushes me on, even if only slowly, like viscous lava rolling slowly down the side of a volcano.

The great majority of research material that I uncover I will never use. Rather, it helps me to feel at home in my world, helps me make choices that feel real to me.

I hear the clunk of Kimmie's footsteps in the kitchen upstairs as she prepares a blender-drink breakfast for herself. Outside the weather is cooler and still: even the frail leaves of the Japanese maple hang motionless in the morning air. I hear the wavering drone of an airplane, but other than that, only the breathy whir of my computer's fan.

Another day, another day.

the goal-directed life

2008-06-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

Another morning, another cup of coffee, another blog-post. I've done my morning research-work (keying notes from A History of Technology, volume 2, and reading the online book The Private Life of the Romans); now it's time to get in a quick post. Such is the structured order of my day.

I like purpose. I've thought and said this many times, but only gradually is its full significance beginning to dawn on me. Everything that people do has some kind of purpose, of course, even the most random-seeming drunken rioting. But I'm speaking here of more consciously chosen, goal-directed behavior. I sense that choosing a goal that is in accord with one's nature, and then consistently pursuing it, is what we call the feeling of meaning in our lives.

The feeling of meaning happens on a smaller scale too. A memory that stands out for me was of traveling with my friend Tim in Spain in December 1978. We had arrived at Cadiz at the Strait of Gibraltar, and were driving through the city in our red VW Westfalia, enjoying the sights and the ambience: palmettos and the lovely blue of the sea after weeks of driving inland. As we drove down along the port we saw a large ferry docked there, marked with its destination: the Canary Islands. There must have been a schedule there, telling us that it would be leaving in a couple of hours. We looked at each other: did we want to go?

Yes, we decided. Cool! Neither of us had imagined we would ever be setting out for the Canary Islands. But we had to take care of some things first--I don't exactly recall what, whether just buying fuel and provisions, or getting the tickets from a travel agent, or taking care of some other business. But anyway, we had to hustle a bit in order to be able to make the sailing. We were still driving around Cadiz, but now we were driving around with a sense of purpose, with a time limit. There was a fresh feeling of adventure and urgency--would we make it on board the ferry? Or would we miss the boat? Now the views of palmettos and sea seemed more fleeting and precious, more charged with meaning. They were the backdrop of an adventure, and took a new aspect. There was a feeling of going forward.

We caught the ferry, and wound up spending Christmas and New Year on Gran Canaria--a delightful side-trip. The mini-adventure of catching the ferry had provided a story in our lives: a goal, and the question of whether it would be achieved.

To me the difference in feeling, the appearance of the very same scenery under these different mental and emotional conditions, was striking. It almost suggested the difference between the ennui of immortality vs. the fleeting excitement of finite life. Catching the ferry was a little metaphor of life: it's short; you've got to attend to your tasks and enjoy the view along the way.

So it is with my reading. It's almost all purpose-driven, part of a bigger project. I think of a guy I knew back at Buddhist Seminary in the Rockies in 1994. He was from (I think) Wisconsin--maybe Minnesota. And he read a great deal, almost all fiction. The way he selected his reading, though, was one I could never adopt. He scanned book reviews of publications that he respected, then set out to read all the works that got the best reviews. He wanted to be reading all the best and most important fiction being published in America. Apart from the fact that I don't read much fiction, this approach would be altogether too passive for me. There's no plan except to try to read everything that other presumed experts regard as "good".

No. I want to be going in my own direction, under my own power, as much as possible, as far as possible.

on (not) being Mozart

2008-06-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

I am a writer, so I should be able to write something in this space.

As I look back at this blog to posts two or three years ago, I myself am struck by how forthright and open I was about my working methods and my writing day. I know that for some years I harbored an idea of running a site that would let spectators in on the workings of the writer's mind while "in action" (if I might stretch the meaning of that phrase). Wouldn't it be cool to see how writers come up with stuff?

I think back to the play and movie Amadeus, in which the successful but second-rate court composer Salieri, burning with creative envy for the brilliant Mozart, contrives to "help" Mozart finish his last great piece. Mozart, lying sick in bed, dictates the score to Salieri, who scratches frantically at the chart-paper to keep up, trying to guess what's coming next. He is skilled enough to be able to write the music, but not gifted enough to be able to create it.

Salieri, I realize now, is an incarnation of Satan or Lucifer as he was eventually conceived by around New Testament times. This character, made famous more recently by John Milton in Paradise Lost, refused, out of pride, to bow down before Adam, God's crowning creation. He had been created sooner, and should not have to concede priority. He would rather be thrown out of heaven than bend his knee.

Satan's sin is held to be pride, but from his point of view he's a victim of injustice--God's injustice. Since it was axiomatic by that time that God was a just God, Satan had an irreconcilable problem. In a certain sense, you could say that Satan was the character with integrity, and as I type these words I find them very interesting indeed.

Salieri complains bitterly to God about His unfairness: that He had bestowed the gift of genius on a silly irreverent rascal like Mozart, while endowing Salieri, who truly loved both music and God, with only a mediocre talent. Why? It was senseless. It was unfair. So, like Lucifer, Salieri turns his back on God and decides to destroy His precious masterpiece, Mozart, just as Satan decided to tempt Adam away from his innocent thralldom to God.

Am I likening myself to Mozart? Or how about Salieri? I may not have Mozart's gifts, but I identify more with him. I was born on 24 January 1959; he was born on 27 January 1756--both in what some astrologers call the Week of the Genius (the first week of Aquarius). Of course, at my age I've already vastly outlived Mozart, who died at 35. I'm still barely getting started! More especially, I tend not to envy other people's abilities. If someone has done something excellent, I want to find out the secret, for I always secretly think I can do it, if I can just find out how. Hence my relentless study.

From another point of view, Salieri's real problem was that he could not accept the way things are--or the way he was. In any endeavor, someone is always going to be the greatest, and the overwhelming likelihood is that that person is not you. If you can't deal with that, then you really do suffer from the sin of pride, and the world--or God--will surely break you sooner or later.

Well. There, I've come up with a post after all.

the writer's Monday-morning status

2008-06-23T07:33:00.000-07:00

I'll check in here with a brief note. Feeling underslept, having awoken at about 4:00. I've beavered away at my research notes and reading. Now is the usual time for a blog-post, but I'd like to save some energy today and see if I can get a bit more direct project-work done. It's a long shot, but worth a try.

Outside: mild sunshine. I'm looking forward to a nap later today.

nature's cathedral

2008-06-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

I'm very skeptical about the theory of evolution as it now exists. I don't doubt that evolution occurs; that seems to be established beyond question. What I can't swallow are the explanations currently on offer for how it happens, what the process is. On the whole these strike me, so far as I'm aware of them, as being pitifully inadequate.

What provokes this spasm of skepticism? Watching my DVD lecture series from The Teaching Company called Understanding the Brain by Jeanette Norden. I've now seen 11 of the 36 half-hour lectures. With my casual but longtime interest in the brain, much of the material is review for me, but quite a lot of it is new too. The structure and function of the brain are such as to make me certain that it cannot be merely the product of random or deterministic processes, no matter how long such processes may have been operating. But for me the coup de grace for a purely random and deterministic origin for the brain came while watching the lecture on development, in which Dr. Norden described how the developing neurons of the fetus are guided precisely into place by helper cells, who in effect shepherd them long distances in order to ensure they wind up where they're supposed to, and are wired up properly with their neighbors.

Looking at my last sentence, I see that I instinctively and without hesitation used the pronoun who to refer to the helper cells, rather than which, meaning that I see them as persons rather than as things. The cells of course are living things, but in general our language is loaded with impersonal and mechanical references, to stay consistent with the prevailing idea that physical processes are necessarily mechanical at bottom. Biologists go through contortions of language to expunge any suggestion that living things, especially low-level ones such as single cells, operate through any kind of consciousness or intention. It is still as Andrew, a scientist acquaintance back in the 1980s, asserted when ruling out certain kinds of explanation: "That would be teleology."

Teleology--the explanation of events by the idea that they are guided by a goal or intentionality--is a "third rail" in biology: an idea with which no serious practitioner can appear to have any truck. It is doctrinally forbidden, for it would appear to open the door to God and "intelligent design".

I understand the resistance to "intelligent design" by biologists, insofar as it is a codeword for sneaking the Bible into school science classes--an event that would indeed signal the intellectual decadence and bankruptcy of our civilization. If "intelligent design" means teaching Genesis 1 in science class, then OK, let's find another term. But the idea of intentionality and purpose--the universal behavior of all living things--does not necessarily mean having to invoke sacred scriptures as our scientific authorities. It does mean thinking about things in a new and more expanded way.

Even back in the 1980s my response to Andrew was, "But what if the processes are teleological--in fact? Wouldn't you want to know?"

I'd want to know--and I do want to know.

I'm developing my own ideas about evolution and life (a fun hobby for me). Maybe I'll share those in due course.

But for now I just wanted to note that in watching this lecture-series on the brain I find I'm gaining access to that important emotion wonder or awe. I think about Joseph Campbell's assertion that the first function of any living mythology is to evoke a sense of wonder or awe, and an image flashed through my mind as I watched and listened: that the brain is a cathedral.

I've visited a few cathedrals, on my trip to Europe with Tim back in 1978. I recall feelings of awe at these buildings, feelings arising from some mixture of the size of the buildings, their beauty, and also an awareness of their age and purpose. They are not utilitarian unless you regard "utility" as including a relationship with the divine or invisible reality.

The brain is incomparably more complex than any cathedral, incomparably better designed and built, by very many orders of magnitude. It's one living structure among many, it's true, but as the seat of consciousness it has a special place, and a special claim to sacred status, I think.

Given that human life is supported by such an ongoing miracle of design and complexity, I inevitably think about the uses to which I'm putting that life. Am I worthy of marvels that support my existence? Or am I squandering them and taking them for granted?

Lots to think about. Luckily, I have just the organ for it.

the reality of writing

2008-06-18T07:13:00.000-07:00

After all my fine talk, yesterday was a naked confrontation with the problem of work-avoidance.

The aspect of writing that seems like it should be the most creative and the most fun, coming up with original ideas through the free play of imagination, is in fact the most daunting part of the job, at least in my opinion. The work is most approachable when it is at its most mechanical. I almost never put off the most mechanical parts of the job, like typing up my research notes. Indeed, I enjoy that part. I start my "creative" day by reviewing the previous day's writing notes, and highlighting possible "keeper" ideas--again, fairly mechanical and easy, and not something I'm inclined to avoid.

But then we arrive at the day's problems: how to push my story forward? This is where the rubber meets the road, and, by and large, it is the place I am most afraid and disinclined to be.

There's nothing for it: here the writer is on the spot. This is where the writer produces. The insertion-point winks slowly on the screen, ready, waiting. It's supposed to be moving forward, with a string of new words trailing after it.

Yes, this is a corny complaint of writers through the ages. But it's real enough. When the writing matters to you, it becomes very difficult. In this respect it is like thinking through your own life-problems. For we all have those: "What should I do about my alcoholic brother?" "My wife can't forgive me for not getting the vice-presidency; what should I do about that?" "I'm not achieving what I wanted to in life; what should I do?"

Questions that seem too hard we tend to simply avoid, push aside--at least, I do. This is not a wholesome strategy; indeed, it's not any strategy. It's what happens when you simply try to dodge the immediate and impending feeling of failure. In writing, you stare at that insertion-point and nothing comes, perhaps. Or only the same stale ideas that you've typed there before. You get to experience yourself in the act of failing--surely no one's favorite experience.

On the other hand, the failure-point is also the success-point. Whatever magic there is in writing, this is where it happens. New ideas do come, they do blossom in the head--familiar words are strung together, and something new appears. It's just that, on any given occasion, you don't know what you're going to get. Or, rather, you have a good idea that, if it's like most such occasions, it will not be very rewarding. The gold, like real gold, is contained in a mass of native rock that has to be dug. And no matter how much you like gold, some days--many, most--you don't feel like digging.

So yesterday I arranged some notes, did some more research reading--I tried to be productive at those lesser, more doable activities, pushing my project forward in an administrative sense, at least.

This is the reality of writing. There's that winking insertion-point right now: ready, waiting, not judging me but simply doing its job. Yes. Will I do mine?

your date with...

2008-06-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm having a hard time coming up with ideas for blog-posts (even if it doesn't seem like it). I think it's at least partly due to the fact that my sense of my own work is changing. I feel less and less that what I'm doing makes me part of any kind of identifiable group--even of "writers". Like a dreamer or a psychotic, I wander ever deeper into a solitary world, from which communication can serve no purpose except to indicate just how separated from my society I have become.

Does that sound depressed? I'm not. Far from it: I feel quite good. How about psychotic--am I that? I don't think so, but then, it's probably not my call to make. As a citizen I seem to be functioning OK, which should keep me free from involuntary hospitalization.

The journey, then, is long, and it is solitary. In a way, though, it is thrilling, for what could be richer and more exciting than to be off any beaten track, away from any conventional path? Of course there are no social gains to be had on such a journey--no fame, no prestige, no riches--for these accrue only to those whose status, whose position, is recognized. There's no audience for the solitary trekker in the forest: only the trees, the birds, and whatever creatures move through the dark brush, still innocent of human contact. You trek into the woods for your date with reality, with your self.

surprise!

2008-06-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

In my last post I raised the topic of what the experience of literature, the experience of reading, actually is. To the extent that we read for pleasure or at least on our own initiative, we must feel we're having a positive experience from it, maybe several positive experiences. Can these be identified?

At some basic level I sense the interplay here of the Familiar and the Strange. Words, in order to communicate, must be familiar--we have to know them. But in order for them to tell us something new, something we didn't know before, they must, in their combination, present us with something strange: a new idea. There is something mysterious about this ability to combine familiar things in new ways to present us with things that are not only strange and new but also relevant and illuminating. The source of the power of literature lies somewhere here.

I think about something I read in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, something that he mentions in passing: that in Shakespeare we find, for the first time, the phenomenon of the character discovering new things about himself in the course of a monologue. We watch a character following a train of thought and coming to novel insights about himself and his world. As I recall, Bloom was saying that the character discovers or forms himself through this process. It's like the old saying, "tell me something I don't know", but applied to ourselves: I tell myself something I didn't know.

Thus the basic experience of literature, the fundamental emotion, if you like, associated with reading, is surprise. My Webster's gives this as sense 3 of the verb surprise:

to strike with wonder and amazement esp. because unexpected

All right, so surprise itself is not the emotion, but rather the trigger for the emotions of wonder and amazement.

Here I'm using wonder and amazement as general terms that have degrees of intensity. I'm referring to our reaction to novelty of all kinds. Novelty attracts our attention and sparks our interest; it engages us. I think about Paul Holinger's assertion in his book What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: that we are born with nine forms of emotional expression hardwired in us. Three of these he calls "signals of fun": interest, enjoyment, and surprise. (The other six he calls "signals for help": distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust, and "dissmell".) I'm saying that a properly functioning literary experience evokes surprise in us, leading on to interest and enjoyment. We may not gasp and gurgle and raise our eyebrows as we did when we were newborns, having learned to internalize our feelings and not let on so transparently. But nonetheless the impulses to do those things are still there, and, I say, can and should be triggered by reading.

Friends, there you have it. The experience of literature is (potentially) the gateway to the full suite of all our positive feelings. What more could one ask?

Back to creating mine...

I'd like to do that

2008-06-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

After three years of blogging, I'm finding it hard to come up with ideas for posts these days. Does this mean that my blog has played itself out--that I've covered all the topics that naturally relate to it? Or does it mean that more of my life and work has become "unbloggable"--not of a nature that I can or want to share in this public space? Or perhaps that my creativity is drying up?

This morning, for example, I was going to launch on a post based on John Fowles's critique of his own novel The Magus--that he was trying to create an experience "beyond the literary". But I recalled then that I've already written about that. Dang! I don't want to be that person who's always repeated the same joke or the same anecdote.

Well, it still raises an important idea: the experience of literature. What kind of an experience does the literary creator seek to create in his readers--and why?

In my case, anyway, there seems to be a certain kind of "imitative inspiration". I read or see something that I really enjoy, and want to create something that has that kind of effect on others. I remember feeling that way when I first saw the movie The Big Chill in 1983. Watching the movie alone in the theater, as I often did in those days, I was moved by it, and as I walked home in the dark across the Granville Street Bridge I thought, "I'd like to make a movie like that!"

Why did I think that?

It seems there are a number of factors. We often think that when we see great athletes or pop stars or dancers: I wish I could do that. Yes, it's partly perhaps envy: "I wish I had other people looking at me and being impressed". But I think that is a relatively small part. Larger is the desire for the sense of joy and presence that mastery suggests. An athlete at the peak of performance is in the moment: absorbed in the synchronization of mind and body with the challenge at hand. This is almost the definition of fun--don't you think? So: "That looks like so much fun! I want to do it too!"

Another aspect is giving back. Just as the athlete or artist has given you an experience that you value, and for which you feel grateful, you want to be able to share that with others--to be the vector of such experiences. You want to be a joy-bringer, a fun-bringer. You want to enrich the culture, enrich people's lives.

One more factor. These thoughts remain mere daydreams or wishful thinking unless there is some native talent or aptitude within one. Where the desire to imitate is strong, I suspect it is one's own talent calling to one: "Yes, that's right--this way. Come on!"

The achievements of others send us the message that this is possible. We know that the achievement is difficult, but that is where the excitement lies: it's difficult, but if you try hard enough, it's possible. It's presenting the possibility of the thrill of achievement, like reaching the peak of a mountain: hard but exhilarating, and worth it.

All these things are ingredients in the cocktail called "I'd like to do that".

I've written before about how these feelings were triggered in me by, among other things, reading Crime and Punishment when I was 13. To produce such an excellent work of art is a noble goal, a worthwhile aim for one's life. It's very easy to be seduced by lesser or counterfeit or consolation aims, such as making lots of money or becoming envied for some other reason. But these are lesser, and at some level we know it.

Back at it then. The mountain-peak still towers far above me...

the end and how to get there

2008-06-12T07:16:00.000-07:00

The finger? Much better, thanks. Its last segment is still a bit hard from inflammation, but it does not hurt, and I can use it at will. I used it to play some guitar last night, and this morning I'm typing with both hands.

Kimmie and I have been watching the 1977 Masterpiece Theatre production of Love for Lydia, based on the novel by H. E. Bates. Set in England of the 1920s and 30s, the story has a moody young man, Edward Richardson, aspiring to be a novelist. While the core of the story is shaped around his love for a beautiful young socialite, Lydia, who also appears to be somewhat mentally ill, I'm interested by how the approach to novel-writing is portrayed. Young Richardson simply rolls a sheet of paper into a typewriter, types "Chapter One", and launches on his book.

While I'm sure that many, no doubt most, novels are written that way, I'm equally sure that very few published ones are. But since it was presumably written this way by Bates, it seems plausible that this was how Bates himself worked. That seems the more likely, since he wrote and published hundreds of works in his lifetime (he died in 1974). (It's also possible though that the material was written in order to conform with the audience's preconceptions in order not to distract from the more important relational parts of the story.)

To me, it's as hard to imagine writing a book without a careful plan as it is to imagine building a house by just starting to dig in the ground and making it up as you go along. And writing a large book is more like building a skyscraper. It's inconceivable that it could work out without detailed planning.

On the other hand, who really knows? All the various methods and techniques for creative writing are probably so much whistling in the dark. In reality, it's probably, as I've mentioned before, as that pilot told me back at Seminary: "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing." Any method that gets you to the end is a good method.

Well then. I suppose I should get on with it.

don't do it

2008-06-11T07:07:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows anything.

This statement was made famous by William Goldman, the screenwriter and novelist, who was making a comment on the movie industry. He was pointing to the fact that many people in that industry, especially studio executives with high salaries, claim to understand the industry and what makes movies successful, and indeed must believe this in order to justify said high salaries, even though the facts seem to point quite the other way. The great majority of movies are flops both critically and commercially. To Goldman the inescapable conclusion was that, all chest-thumping aside, nobody in the movie industry, not even those who have been in it longest and have enjoyed the most success, really knows what makes a movie successful. Nobody knows what's going to work. Or, in brief: nobody knows anything.

But why stop there? Is this condition merely an aspect of movies, or is it a more general phenomenon? When it comes right down to it, who really knows what they're doing? Does anyone?

Take the Iraq War. The stated reasons for the invasion were Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's links with Al Qaeda. For the sake of argument, let's assume everyone was sincere and honest about this from the start. Before long it came out that these reasons were in fact nonexistent. On the face of it, it would appear that the invasion was therefore a boo-boo, even in its own terms. Assuming sincerity and honesty, a lack of knowledge led to a mistaken and highly costly and bloody action, and we have every reason to think that Goldman's dictum applies 100% in this case as well.

That's a spectacular instance, but by no means the only one. You don't have to be a Buddhist to see that ignorance is the driving force behind much of our activity, perhaps all of it. From Thalidomide to CFCs to pumping groundwater dry throughout the world (currently under way--soon much of the world will be without water to irrigate crops with or to drink): action is confidently undertaken on the basis of incomplete knowledge, with disastrous results.

We hear of the "law of unintended consequences": everything we do brings a harvest of unexpected knock-on effects. Many of those are unpleasant, and have us scrambling to take new ill-informed actions to try to deal with them. I'm wondering whether the law of unintended consequences is the motto on the flip side of the coin of "nobody knows anything".

It feels good to do things instead of just sitting around on one's duff. I often feel bad about how little I do. But if we look at it objectively, the world would probably be in a lot better shape if more of us spent more time on our duffs and not trying to do things. This is the view of Hinayana Buddhism (sort of), as well as the Hippocratic Oath: "first of all, do no harm". As in first aid, the wise, disciplined approach is often a matter of not doing too much. Meditation, indeed, is really just a calculated strategy of sitting on one's duff.

Ha--here's maybe a case in point. I was just seeing Kimmie off to work. On the front porch, I swung the door closed behind me--only to have it slam on my fingertip. Smash. I gave it a good one, and it hurt plenty (still does--I'm typing this with my left hand).

I didn't know what I was doing.

( don't worry--I've been applying an ice-pack, and it's starting to calm down.)

Yeah, I'm liking sitting on my duff--the perfect activity for those of us who don't know anything.

getting a kick

2008-06-10T07:08:00.000-07:00

Early this morning I dreamed that I had managed to get my family aboard a special ferry (my family here consisting of Kimmie plus my mother and aunt, and possibly also my sister Mara). In a queue leading up one side of the ship, we can look out the windows on a commanding view of what I take to be the pulp-producing town of Powell River (implying that we're really on a train instead). I point that out, then try to rush ahead so that we can see other views out other windows at the bow of the ferry.

In the forward lounge I try to secure us a table, which is cluttered with other people's dishes and wrappers. An imperious and nasty woman is trying to get the same table for her party, but won't sit there until it's cleared. While she stridently and rudely orders a steward to clear it for her, I simply take the table as is, wondering whether I'll be getting into a fight with this termagant.

My women start to take places here, while I point out the other views available: the Gulf Islands as though from on high. I'm proud because I've done this trip before, while it is new to them. I want to go to the far side to check out the windows there, for I know other great views will be visible if we get to them soon enough--maybe of Salt Spring Island or Saanich on Vancouver Island.

I hurry over, and find I have to squeeze through a small gap between a bar-counter and a wall. On the other side of the gap, by the windows, are a few people and several horses, which I suppose they're transporting. But out the windows here there is indeed another new and wonderful view. I feel a bit intimidated, but think that the horses must be tame and safe to be on board. Having to squeeze through the gap means I must move close to them, there's no help for it. So I quickly squeeze through.

As I do, I see that there is a foal here, and I become alarmed, because the foal's mother will no doubt be protective. The foal scampers near me, curious and affectionate. I try to dodge away, but before I know it I feel a terrific wallop on my thigh--I've been kicked by the mare! It happened so fast. I hurry around another counter, wondering whether my leg has been broken. No, it seems OK. I feel annoyed, but also embarrassed that this has happened to me. I must seem like an inexperienced sucker--the only one here who's managed to be kicked by one of these horses. But maybe I'll be impressive too when I tell my family about it.

This dream is one of a string of strange new dreams I've had in the past few days. As far as I can recall, I've never dreamed about horses before, and certainly never about being kicked by one. A common theme of my dreams since about 2002 has been of trying to catch ferries, buses, trains, and airplanes, sometimes getting them and sometimes not.

I recognize some of the dream's ingredients: my father stopped by to visit a week ago, and he had ridden the ferry over from Vancouver Island where he lives. Recently too Kimmie and I talked about a little vacation trip we took with Robin to the Gulf Islands in 1990, when I had recently been to Salt Spring Island on a solitary meditation retreat and so knew the ropes of that particular route. On that trip we had visited a park on Salt Spring where a cliff-edge lookout overhangs the sea hundreds of feet below, and Kimmie had been too terrified to go near the railing, instead repeatedly ordering us to come away from it.

There was a reference to horses in The History of Technology yesterday. Evidently in medieval times the horse began to replace the ox as the preferred draft-animal for plowing and threshing, its lower strength and higher cost being offset by its greater speed. The changeable weather in Europe made speed increasingly important as more land was cultivated, and people at harvest-time needed to get crops in as quickly as possible. Before that time there had not been any harness that allowed horses to pull heavy weights without choking themselves. Horses lack the powerful shoulders of the ox.

What does it all mean? The horses were pintos.

I've been fascinated by dreams ever since I was a child. They are the primal storytelling medium. And they remain a deep mystery.

out with the old, in with the more complicated

2008-06-09T07:22:00.000-07:00

Back to the routine of regular life. Kimmie prepares to head off again to the office, out into the still-gray weather that also characterized our week of vacation here at home. I too will try to return to full productivity.

Of course, I kept up with my reading and my notes over the vacation. To me those things are not mere duty, but what I do for pleasure as well. For better or for worse, I'm not in the situation of Stephen King, who did his actual creative writing 365 days a year because that was what he enjoyed. For whatever reason, and to whatever end, my approach is much more deliberate.

Early in our week off our old television packed it in. It had been an excellent set over all--a Sony, about 24 inches I think, that I got in 1990 on a rent-to-own basis because I was unemployed (oops, I mean a full-time TV series creator). A couple of times in the preceding week the set had switched itself off and then on again in the middle of a program. On Saturday night (June 1), just as we were starting to watch our weekly movie (The Bridges of Madison County in this case), it switched itself off and I could not get power restored to it. We wound up watching the movie on my new laptop, the sound tinny and faint from the speaker even with the computer close to us, resting on top of the coffee-table.

The next day we headed to Future Shop in Park Royal to look for a new set, and wound up buying one--or rather a whole system, since to be fully high-definition-ready it seems you need not just a TV set but also a digital set-top box, and ideally also an expensive HDMI connecting cable to carry the signal between them. The price of all this was about double the maximum amount I'd regarded myself as prepared to pay.

But when it comes to technology purchases, or indeed anything that I really want, I don't like to scrimp. If I only buy a TV every 18 years, I want to get one that's near the front of the technology, not at the rear, so the thing can last.

We went for it. The package consists of a Sharp 32-inch LCD flat-screen television with a Motorola set-top box that includes a 160-gigabyte hard drive for recording programs. The TV is plenty big enough, since we sit quite close to it (I think of a saying my father used to invoke from time to time: "white man build big fire, sit far away; Indian build small fire, sit close".) And the picture and sound are excellent--a leap beyond what we had, for sure.

There are some negatives. The new system is complicated to use--two more remote-control units. And the user's guides that come with the units are poor. Indeed, the Motorola guide is laughably inadequate. The page on using the video-recording feature is simply a list of features, with not one word on how to use the thing. Easily the worst user's guide I've ever seen. If I were interested in chasing copywriting work, I'd write Motorola and offer to write a better one.

Robin, who already has a digital flat-screen TV, wondered why we need a set-top box. Doesn't the digital signal just come through the cable into the TV, as on hers? Our salesman insisted that we can't get a full high-definition signal without the set-top box, so we got it. But as to precisely why that is, I don't know--and my user's guides certainly won't tell me. So, as ever, I'm taking matters into my own hands: I shopped for and bought a book on digital TV from Amazon.com a couple of days ago. I'll wait for that and hope it straightens me out--or at least that I can tell Robin why we sprang for a $650 piece of auxiliary equipment to go with our new TV set.

Meanwhile, TV is very enjoyable again. This past Saturday we watched Apollo 13, the next title in Paul's 90s Festival, and it came across powerfully on our new screen.

vacation mode

2008-06-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

Kimmie has taken this week off, and so we're in "vacation" mode. That means sleeping in (this morning I staggered out of bed at the late hour of 7:05), and a change away from the usual routine--including blog-posts. I may not be writing more posts until we return to normal next week.

Meanwhile, it looks like we've got rain for much of our vacation week--plus there are roofers working next door. I don't mind hammering, but power tools are a blight on suburban life. To their credit, these guys run power tools quite seldom--not as much as all the gardeners attending to the grounds of the townhouses hereabouts (including ours). For me it increasingly means wearing earplugs in the daytime as well as at night, because I can't stand noise.

So: on with it. To all of you who check in to read my blog, thank you--I appreciate your attention.

the brain and I

2008-05-28T07:05:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month something prompted me to an ad in Scientific American (one of the magazines I read fairly regularly) and order a lecture series on DVD called Understanding the Brain. Published by an organization called The Teaching Company, it's a set of 36 half-hour lectures delivered by Dr. Jeanette Norden, a scientist at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, accompanied by some simple computer animation instead of the usual lecture-hall overhead-projector transparencies (at least, that's what they used to use back in the days of my, uh, formal education). So now I've added a half hour of brain lecture to my daily diet of study.

What's with me? I felt a bit conflicted about ordering this series, since it cost money: even as a special promotion, the total package, with bound transcripts of the lectures included, came to something like $165. And when the package arrived at my door, I was also stung with GST and PST, plus a $10 service charge from Fedex for paying those taxes on my behalf at the border. (Not quite as offensive as the fee charged by our own federal government for levying GST on packages coming from the U.S.--that's right, they charge a fee for collecting tax.) It costs money to get smart--and in my current incarnation as an artist, money is in relatively short supply.

Still, once I make my decision I feel happy about it. I seldom suffer from buyer's remorse for buying books or other educational materials (except for fiction--there I find that buyer's remorse is my usual response, such that I rarely buy fiction nowadays).

I remember years ago--it would have been 1977--standing in Duthie Books on Robson Street, down in the subterranean section of the store called the Paperback Cellar, accessed by a spiral staircase of wrought iron. Having been hugely impressed by reading Joyce's A Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, I was keen to read more Joyce. I stood there, staring at the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Ulysses--an oversize trade paperback priced at $5.95, then a much higher price than the average paperback. I felt conflicted about spending so much on a book. But then I thought: What the hell, I'm employed, and this is one of the world's greatest works of literature. It's cheap!

I bought it. No regrets. (In fact, I eventually bought another copy, for complicated reasons, and now have two copies of this same edition in my shelf--one weathered and beaten, the other pristine.)

So yes: the brain. I've long been interested in it. Back when I was a student I was interested in computer science and especially in artificial intelligence--the effort to get computers to simulate (or actually achieve) conscious life. (In the end I realized I was more excited about writing fiction about such things, and abandoned my school career to work on a novel--later aborted--centered on an artificial-intelligence project gone awry.) At one level it makes sense: if our experience of consciousness depends on a physical thing, the brain, and its mechanical processes, then why should such mechanical processes not be reproducible in another form?

Back then I was quite afraid of the idea that my mind, my actions, were perhaps determined by fixed laws, physical mechanisms. Reading about the brain could make me anxious. But the interest was there; it remained strong, and is still strong.

So this course on the brain is one of my forays into "general knowledge"--it is not directly related to research on my project The Mission. It will no doubt have a bearing on future projects of mine, though. And meanwhile the organ that I think with seems to want to know more about itself. Why not indulge it a bit?

switching tracks as a way of life

2008-05-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

I've just looked up the word divagate in my Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Here's the definition:

to wander or stray from a course or subject : DIVERGE, DIGRESS

I was trying to come up with a word to express my way of studying, thinking, talking--my way of life, I suppose. It's what sprang to mind and I reckon it's close enough.

When I study, think, or talk--or when I write, for that matter--I keep switching tracks, elaborating on some sub-point before I get to the end of my initial point, and then going down a further digression on a sub-sub-point, until, quite often, I've forgotten my initial point--how I got here. My interlocutor has to help me out and remind me of what I was talking about.

It's not mere wandering attention or an inability to focus. On the contrary, it almost comes from a particular intensity of focus. I want to say exactly what I mean, but often I'm not sure exactly what I mean, and I'm thinking things through as I go. As a result, often, when I'm talking, I start the same sentence or point two or three different ways, searching for the right way in. I'm a strange mix: for the purposes of light conversation and repartee I'm quick and fluent, but when it comes to expressing more serious, important thoughts, I'm hesitant and laborious.

I'm very dissatisfied with lazy, ill-considered thoughts. It seems to me that most of the actions in the world are ill-considered, including--or especially--those taken by the world's most powerful people. Mostly we get by with very flabby, self-serving "reasons" for our views.

One example, which I get from Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes", was the thinking about the issue of genocide in European history. From the British point of view, the mass deaths brought to colonized people like the Canary Islanders and the Indians of the Americas by the Spanish were easy to explain: the Spaniards were notoriously cruel and bloodthirsty. There: problem solved. But when natives were dying in large numbers under British colonial rule, and not entirely by disease, but also through mistreatment and massacre, new reasons had to be found. The "science" of colonial domination was developed through the 19th century, greatly aided by Darwin's theory of evolution, which held that "survival of the fittest" was an impersonal law that cannot be altered. The ideology was already well developed when Adolf Hitler was still in short pants.

When I try to say something true, something that I believe, I find myself wondering why I think it's true--and whether I really do indeed think it's true. This trait has me hemming, hawing, and hesitating. In writing it has me taking laborious care to establish a foundation under what I say. (Well, except for this blog! It's more off the cuff. Although even here I find myself going slowly, thinking, typing.)

I hop from subject to subject, all connected, since some sub-point within one leads to the next. But it often takes me a long time to get back to an earlier branch in this garden of forking paths--if I ever get back there.

Somehow, this is how I operate.

billions

2008-05-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

It seems I'm finally coming up against what I feared when I first started this blog back in 2005: that I might run out of things to write about.

I used to keep a file of possible blog-post topics, but found that I never referred to it, preferring to shoot from the hip when I opened up the posting window. Why not just grab whatever's going through my mind, and start typing?

Sounds good. And maybe if I had more guts I could really follow through with that. But I feel constrained by the fact that, on the one hand, I don't want to talk too much about the content of my work in progress, the ostensible theme of this blog, and on the other that many of the other thoughts and feelings that dominate my life right now are things that are very private and inward.

So: here I sit.

Another week begins, and I must pray to the Muse to grant me a few more lines of my work--or at least the gumption to open up its files and face it, something I found that I couldn't do last Friday.

It helps to keep some perspective. Last night on CBC Newsworld I watched Brian Stewart interview the economist Paul Collier about his book The Bottom Billion, about the world's poorest people. These are the people--or whole families--who try to survive on less than $1 a day. Many of those people are in Africa. There were video clips of violence in Africa: unarmed people running for their lives while "soldiers" shot at them, and so on. What a mess.

I liked Paul Collier--a Brit who used to work for the World Bank. As he observed, political stability has only ever arrived anywhere at a great price in violence and upheaval, a fact we should bear in mind as we shake our heads over Africa. And, I think, even once it's achieved it's fragile, ready to be smashed when the strong give in to the temptation to gain their ends by force, and reap the whirlwind of violence.

As one of the "top billion", I have nothing to complain about. So I should get to work, then.

pointing-out instructions

2008-05-22T07:15:00.000-07:00

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is a particular class of teachings called "pointing-out instructions". These are essentially tips given by a realized teacher to his student so that the student may recognize aspects of his experience for what they are. The student may already be having the experience, but doesn't know he's having it. So the teacher points it out to him. The teacher can't give you the experience, he can only point to it in the hope that you'll recognize it.

In a more mundane sense, I think this is basically what writing does, or is supposed to do.

For why, I wondered, in a world with so much sensual richness and variety, do I spend so much of my time scanning my eyes along a track of ink-marks on paper? As sensory inputs go, this is thin gruel. Imagine how quickly you would grow tired of scanning your eyes along the pages of a book written in a language you don't know. It would get very boring, very quickly. You would become acutely conscious of how little stimulation you're receiving, and seek to increase it, most likely by tossing that book aside and doing something else.

But reading in English is something I can do, happily, for hours each day. Indeed, I feel I'm missing out if I don't read in a day.

It's not purely a matter of entertainment. Activities that are "purely" entertainment--such as, say, video games--are things I usually tire of quickly.

No, for me reading is about learning. But it's not simply learning for its own sake. For to sustain a positive interest in learning something, you have to feel that it's relevant to your experience, your life. You need to feel that the new knowledge is, in the widest sense, practical. The knowledge will enrich your experience of life.

When I read nonfiction, like, say, A History of Technology, I'm learning in a straightforward, traditional way. The knowledge is practical for me because I'm writing historical fiction and need to know those things; and also because it enriches my appreciation of the world around me. Instead of looking at, say, a ship in the harbor and simply taking it for granted, my view of it is enriched by having learned a little about the history of ships--about how they evolved ultimately from the dugout canoe, and how for a long time they bore traces of that origin in their design and construction. Instead of merely sweeping my eyes over the ship, en route to looking at something else, I might actually see it, notice it. It becomes a more vibrant detail of my experience. In a certain sense, it has been pointed out to me.

Fiction makes this process (potentially anyway) more intimate and intense. A stream of artistic prose carries your mind along a track of pure noticing. Just as, in a painting, every square millimeter of the canvas had to be worked by the artist, had to be seen and depicted, to create a vibrant work that is purely and everywhere the expression of the artist's vision, so in a work of writing every word is a contribution to a total, unflagging act of attention by the writer, communicated to the reader. Word by word, the writer draws your attention to things: sensations, thoughts, feelings. One by one, point by point, in a meaningful, purposeful structure. The writer is pointing out aspects of your experience to you.

This is what makes a resort to cliches such a sin in writing: it is a failure of attention, shoving something fake into an intimate experience of genuineness.

Yes, I like having valuable things pointed out to me. So I'll keep on with my reading.

hearts of darkness

2008-05-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

Having set aside, as I mentioned, the historical novel Spartacus by the young Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon, I continue to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Now about 20 pages in, I find I'm continuing to really enjoy it.

Let's take a look at how Conrad opens the story:

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

I found this opening interesting, but not especially exciting. Its high content of nautical jargon shows that this is a special interest of the narrator, but for me has a slightly distancing effect. And although the Wikipedia article on Conrad says that he is "recognized as a master prose stylist," I personally find his prose a little bit awkward, a little bit hard to follow. I sometimes find myself having to read his sentences a couple of times to get their meaning. Maybe this is due to the fact that English was a language that Conrad, a Pole, did not pick up until he was an adult. Still, his opener is good because he does not talk down to the reader; the narrator is treating me with respect, so I'm willing to extend him lots of credit.

Prose style is important, of course, but I think it is not by any means the main ingredient of high-quality writing. Trying to think of what actually is the main ingredient, I've come up with: "way of seeing". It's the writer's way of seeing the world--along with the ability to express this--that sets him or her apart. What details does he relate in order to convey his meaning?

Conrad opens Heart of Darkness by setting the scene: the Nellie rides at anchor at flood tide on the Thames estuary, and its officers are hanging out on deck waiting for the tide to change. The narrator names three of them by title only--Director, Lawyer, Accountant--but the fourth by name: Marlow. I found the first sketch of Marlow striking:

Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and with his arms dropped, the palms of his hands outwards, resembled an idol.

I would say that at this point, in paragraph 4 of the story, I felt myself engage with the narrative. Marlow, after this short introductory description, is already an interesting and unusual character--very specific. I found myself curious about him right away. You won't find a character description like this in an average potboiler novel. An average writer doesn't see people this way--isn't able to see them this way; that is exactly why that writer is average. It is not the flattering description of a hero (sunken cheeks, yellow complexion), but an interested and detached description by a keen observer who chooses telling details. A sailor, sitting cross-legged against the mizzen-mast, palms outward, to me is an excitingly real image. It engages my belief in what I'm reading, and bonds me to the narrator. I start to feel that I can really trust him with my attention and credulity.

I first read Heart of Darkness in, I think, 1979, probably just after seeing Apocalypse Now, when I learned that the movie was based on Conrad's book. Since Apocalypse Now was regarded as an "important" movie, and I was a budding film-maker, I wanted to get a better grounding in what it was about. (The movie itself was, for me, a disappointment.) I didn't give the novella the attention it deserved, and raced through it to "get it read." I didn't remember much about it.

The thematic path that has led me back to it is via Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes", an investigation into the origins of genocide. Heart of Darkness is one of the central books he looks at. Lindqvist shows persuasively the documents and events that Conrad was exposed to just before he drafted his famous work--tells the story of how the ideas were formed and shaped.

It's part of the story of evil: where do the evils of our world come from? What drives us to commit acts of evil? These are questions that preoccupy me now.

another one bites the dust

2008-05-20T07:12:00.000-07:00

Thundershowers outside. The soft pale pink of rhododendron blossoms and bluebells glows under the gray sky.

Yesterday was Victoria Day in Canada; Kimmie and I relaxed in the prolonged weekend, and put up wall-shelves in her sewing-room to accommodate the growing crowd of Barbie-dolls clothed in her sumptuous creations. She bought about a half-dozen dolls over the weekend at Value Village in Vancouver--all brunettes this time. Lovingly she washed the dolls and shampooed and, yes, conditioned their hair. (Kimmie never had Barbie-dolls as a girl.) More models for her small-scale couture.

As for me, more reading, more notes. I left off reading Spartacus, a historical novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pen name of Scottish writer James Leslie Mitchell, who died in 1935 at age 33, having, according to one source at least, apparently worked himself to death (not how I plan to go!).

Gibbon, a passionate socialist, was a talented writer, but I found that, even though I was most interested in the period and the events (I bought the book precisely because it was about the Spartacus slave revolt), the narrative did not hold me. I was influenced partly by the reviews on Amazon.com, which were ecstatic.

What went wrong? Gibbon's style is appealingly vivid and terse. He packs a lot into the opening sentence, for instance:

When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master's body even as his own had been mutilated: and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast.

It's an eventful first sentence, to be sure. I especially liked the detail that the slave is carrying a copy of the Republic. But this purely outer view of the action proved to be Gibbon's way of narrating all the action in the book. We never get too much inside characters' heads, and thus the story has a rather cinematic quality: sights and sounds without thoughts or feelings. To me, as I think about it, this is a particular weakness in historical fiction, where there is a particular barrier, the gulf of time, to the modern reader's being able to identify with characters and feel connected to the story. Getting inside characters' heads is exactly how to make a modern reader feel at home in the ancient world.

When Robert Graves wrote his Claudius novels he narrated them in the first person, as Claudius, and thus provided an automatic entry to the inner world of his character. Yes, Claudius's ways of thinking and feeling seem strange at times--but at other times not. We recognize him as a person like ourselves, and even have the intriguing thrill of witnessing just how different an ancient person's thoughts are from our own, rather than merely seeing how strange their actions are, and puzzling over why.

Such, anyway, are a few of my thoughts. I had made it just past page 100 of Spartacus, and realized that it was a chore to keep on reading, so I pulled the bookmark and sent the book back to its slot in our bedroom shelf. I pulled out my new copy of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and started (re)reading that instead. I experienced the pleasure of embarking on a story by an experienced, self-assured writer who has something important to say.

So, yes, novel-wise, another one bites the dust.

making your own mistakes

2008-05-15T07:11:00.000-07:00

The writing life, I suppose, is what you make it. While there may be certain characteristics found in the lives of many writers, there is not a single "writing lifestyle"; the discipline--if I can call it that--is too wayward and elusive to be pinned down in a definite approach.

In reading James Carroll's House of War yesterday, I came across his mention of how he had given up the Catholic priesthood--his initial vocation--in the wake of angst and disillusionment over the Vietnam War and the peace movement, and decided to take up writing. He had broken off contact with his father, who had been in charge of intelligence at the Pentagon, to live in a small apartment north of Boston, devoting himself to the crafting of words.

I felt a sense of admiration for and kinship with Carroll in his making of that decision. In my own way I made a similar decision, at a younger age, turning my back on other occupations and possibilities to take up writing as my...what, profession? vocation? path? In my case I can pinpoint the time: it was a day in early December 1979, in the Sedgewick Library at UBC, where I was doing last-minute studying for the final exam of Math 100. An unhappy and alienated student, I did not in any way feel part of the university, or part of anything. I had no specific career or goal in mind. I was trailing along, going through the motions. The only thing I felt any passion for was writing, but I was not enrolled in and was not interested in taking any "creative writing" courses at the university, which I felt sure would be a painful waste of time.

Sitting at a table, with pale winter sunlight coming in the windows, I felt a sense of crisis grow as the clock swept closer to the time of the exam. It was a short walk away in the Math building, but I would still need to allow some time to get there. The minute-hand clicked, closer to the hour--and clicked again, then again. I still hadn't got up. With a feeling of alarm I wondered whether I was going to just sit there and not go to the exam, which would mean, in effect, dropping out of math, and therefore, in effect, out of university. No point in going if you're not going to write the exams...

Butterflies entered my stomach. What am I doing? I wasn't sure, but I was aware that I was on the brink of allowing a whole life--a life of normality, achievement, and social acceptance--to crash down behind me while I faced something else: another kind of life, an unknown kind.

Exam-time arrived, and I was still in the library. I had made my choice. Exhilarated, I packed up my books and walked into the cool sunny air, away from the library, away from the Math building, up to the gravel expanse of "C" Lot to the yellow Volkswagen to drive home. I stopped at Safeway on 4th Avenue to pick up a Christmas turkey for the household. I was a different person. For better or for worse, I had taken a step toward my own life, a decision that had come from within me. I knew it would bring difficulty, would be hard to explain. But it was genuine and authentic to myself, so I felt good--very good.

Since then I've had some successes, and quite a few failures, and I still feel some of the awkwardness and misfit-ness that I felt in university. I live in society, but I'm not really of it. It's a solitary path and it often bothers me, in the sense that it doesn't count as a normal "career".

But deep down I have no regrets. Indeed, I wish everyone the same thing: to feel able to do what they really want to do, and not simply flow with the swift-running current of society.

So I've cobbled together a life in a suburb that seems to work for me. There are dissatisfactions and difficulties--but who doesn't have those? I'd rather have my own set of dissatisfactions, and not someone else's hand-me-downs. Even if you're making mistakes, big ones, they should be your own, and not merely someone else's idea.

Now if I could just cast off my nagging bourgeois preoccupation with productivity and revenue...

Rumpelstiltskin the writer

2008-05-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

I regarded yesterday as a small victory. My output was slight--but I had an output. When I came down to my office after breakfast, it was looking bad: another day of project-avoidance.

I fiddled and footled with other things, painfully aware of my procrastination. But eventually I coaxed myself into opening up my working files. Unhappily and with distaste I made myself look at my draft in progress, the chapter I've numbered 31(b), growing slowly as a yew-tree. Where does it need to go? Has it started the right way?

The ice cracked when a specific question occurred to me. It was a question about how certain minor characters, holders of a specific job-function, would behave at a particular moment. What was their job? The smallness and specificness of this question was what enabled me to get going. I could go to my Notes document and type my thoughts, such as they were. Would they lay their hands on my character, or not?

This caused me to look at my story-world more closely, to go in and make a decision, or two or three related decisions--small ones. This is the difficulty of writing, I think: decision-making. One of the biggest obstacles to writing is vagueness: an indefiniteness about the subject. If your information is too scanty, you've got nothing to write. If you force yourself to write when you don't have enough information, you become an author of cliches.

In fiction-writing, developing the details of what to write takes effort. Those details have to be discovered, imagined, decided on. Ideally, you need enough information so that you can pick and choose: you can make creative choices.

This is partly a matter of technical research, and partly a matter of active imagination. For the writing to be good, the fictional world must become as definite and specific as the real world--the world of memories, for example. It's like constructing sets for theater or the movies: the set needs to be complete before you can film your scene there. In filmmaking there's a document called the call-sheet that specifies all the people and equipment that need to be on the set for the filming of that day's scenes: actors, hair stylists, special camera gear, automobiles, and so on. Someone has to work out all those details and figure out what's needed, and when.

Writing fiction is the mental equivalent of that. The "set" is in one's head--one's imagination. But it too needs to be furnished through a process. It requires education, research, imagination, and decision-making. I believe that the power of the finished work, the amount of interest and pleasure it can evoke in a reader, depends on how much of this type of effort has gone into it.

All that material furnishes the straw which Rumpelstiltskin the writer spins into gold.

musings of a braided stream

2008-05-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've been staring at the screen here for a few minutes now. What to write about?

One of the books I'm reading right now is The New Larousse Encyclopedia of the Earth. I've finished the chapter on "Running Water" and have started the chapter on "Oceans and Lakes". In his discussion of running water, Bertin describes the different kinds of streams--for there is a great variety of types of river. In Buddhism, the mind is sometimes likened to a river, the stream of which shows many different manifestations, from rushing gorge to placid pool, without changing its essential nature.

Right now I feel that my own mind is like a "braided stream": a river that, having dropped a great deal of sediment on a comparatively flat ground, has broken into multiple intersecting channels, weaving across the landscape. There doesn't seem to be a "mainstream", just lots of parallel channels moving along together. My mind lacks its usual focus; it feels dispersed and unenergetic.

Astrologically this corresponds with a major transit of the planet Neptune, which is running over my natal Venus and square to my natal Mars. Neptune is a boundary-dissolver; it represents the yearning for perfection and bliss, which cannot usually be attained in the limited frame of an individual body and mind. Therefore Neptune symbolizes the desire to merge with something greater, to lose one's burdensome identity, to recover the lost bliss of the womb, before separation was discovered.

The transit of Neptune to Mars is always difficult, since Neptune represents the urge to give up and transcend ego, while Mars represents our selfish side: how we seek to assert our individuality and satisfy our personal wants. A common Neptune theme is sacrifice, giving up something we value without getting any obvious personal benefit in return. Our Mars nature generally finds this idea most unsatisfactory.

To a great extent, life is about giving things up. For one thing, being born means that death inevitably awaits us; we will all have to surrender our lives at some point. But along the way, other things have to be surrendered. Scott Peck talks about this process in his famous book, The Road Less Traveled. What we surrender in the process of maturing are the beliefs and goals of our youth. He provides a list of six or eight typical ones. One is the adolescent belief in omnipotentiality--the idea that I can do or be anything I want. As time goes on, we make decisions and close off avenues. When I was 10 years old, for instance, it may have been possible to aspire to be a professional athlete or a chess champion. Now, even if I wanted those things, I couldn't have them.

Omnipotentiality is not a reality in any case, I don't think. It was probably never an option for me to be either an athlete or a chess champion, not just because of lack of native talent, but even more importantly because of lack of desire. I didn't want those things. Fantasizing about them is like a giraffe fantasizing about being a cheetah. If you're a giraffe, you've got to go with that--there's no choice.

Surrendering such beliefs or fantasies is, I suppose, technically, disillusionment. We use the term in a negative way, usually--but what's so bad about losing your illusions? What do we have against reality? Isn't that just a drug-addict's view of life?

In Buddhism, disillusionment is seen as a good thing. Chogyan Trungpa Rinpoche, in teaching the practice of meditation, never made any promises to his students, except perhaps two: boredom and disappointment. Every student could look forward to those. We generally avoid those experiences like the plague, but Trungpa Rinpoche was enthusiastic about them both. Why? Because they're anti-ego. They're exactly what ego is continually seeking to evade and prevent.

But this is also the message of Neptune. If you identify with your ego and its desires, you're going to suffer anyway. If you can see your ego and its wants as not a big deal, then you suffer much less.

Easier said than done. Like many people, I tend to take my desires and hopes seriously, and feel about surrendering them the way Charlton Heston felt about surrendering his gun: you'll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands...

keeping the posts short

2008-05-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

I seem to be running behind. I know: I have no job, no fixed schedule; what can "behind" mean to me?

Well, I live a routine life, just as much as if I had a regular job. This is the most productive way to live, I find--and productivity is important to me, appearances notwithstanding. The meagerness of my output is not due to any desire to keep my work in short supply. But without my routine, that output would be more meager still.

So I'm very aware of time. At any given moment of the day, I can usually guess the time to within about 5 minutes. To have a productive day, I know where I should be at each time of that day.

I fit the writing of blog-posts in after my morning research-notes-with-coffee, and before I head up for breakfast. In order for the blog to stay alive, it' s important that it not take too much time. Sometimes I get caught up in my argument or point, though, and find that a post can take me an hour to write. I don't feel good when that happens--it's too much time.

Today, running late, my intention was to jot down only a quick, back-of-envelope blog-post. It's already become longer and fleshier than what I intended, so that's a bonus.

But it's time to get on with my, uh, "real" day, such as that is.

On with the week, on with my work.

finding out what works

2008-05-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

I find that I'm rebelling against my blog, now three years old. These days I'm not sure what to say, or why exactly I'm doing this. There's a balancing act between talking about the process of creating this work, and the danger of revealing too much about it. It's a little bit like watching a "making of" documentary about a movie before seeing the movie--putting the cart before the horse.

In another sense, though, the creation of any work of art is beyond the worldly and quotidian circumstances of its physical creation, and indeed a work of art is beyond what its creator can say or indeed know about it. Northrop Frye makes this point in his Anatomy of Criticism, which I'm currently reading. What a poet may have to say about his own work, Frye says, may have special interest, but not special authority. For in talking about his own work, the poet becomes a critic, and he may be a good or bad one, but there's no such thing as a definitive critic--one who has the last word on any given work of art.

I bought Anatomy of Criticism when I learned that in it Frye talks about, at least in passing, the epic genre. I'm thirsty and hungry for anything I can find out about this. What does epic mean? What does genre mean? Are these real, actual things, or merely terms bandied about vaguely by students of literature, with no real consensus as to what they actually refer to?

Frye's landmark book, first published in 1957, addressed what he saw as the central and long-neglected question about literary criticism: is there such a thing as knowledge about literary art, or is everything, in the end, simply and merely a matter of taste? Is there or could there be such a thing as a science of literary criticism--a field of knowledge that progresses and grows in the same way that other fields of scientific knowledge progress and grow? Could the study of literary criticism be like the study of physics or geography?

Northrop Frye emphatically believed that such a science is possible, and Anatomy of Criticism is his effort to sketch out its scope, methods, and agenda. It's a brilliant work in its own right, dense with bold, deep ideas. He essentially picks up the ball of a scientific poetics where Aristotle left it 2,300 years ago, and runs it further up the field.

I'm on page 125, and have not yet reached his detailed discussion of genre, but he has already given me plenty to think about. Indeed, any given page of this book could serve as the basis of a separate thesis, so rich is it with ideas.

Why exactly am I so keen on studying genre, and especially the epic genre? Don't most writers just wing it and write what they want without worrying too much about their "category"?

It's not so much that I want to conform to a pattern, but I do want to know what I'm building. Why reinvent the wheel? If you're setting out to build a bridge, wouldn't it make sense to find out how others have done it, what the techniques and hazards are? What if you built a house, but out of ignorance neglected to include bedrooms? Wouldn't that be silly?

A genre by definition is a structurally stable form. Like a genus or species of animal or plant, it exists because it works. The raccoons that patrol our yard at night are a viable form of life; they can make it in this novel environment; as an organism, they work.

I want to create something that works: a pragmatic goal.

aging (dis)gracefully

2008-05-07T07:12:00.000-07:00

Speaking for myself, these are uncertain times. As one gets older, it seems reasonable to suppose that one should get wiser, more mature, and generally acquire a better outlook on life.

But this isn't necessarily so. I think about the saying that some people "forget nothing and learn nothing". But I worry that there could be another saying, that some people "study everything and learn nothing". Or simply that in one's older age, the chickens of one's youthful folly and hubris come home to roost.

Yesterday I continued to make my way through James Carroll's House of War, his history of the Pentagon. The book is not exactly what I expected it to be, but I am enjoying it very much--maybe more than if it had been what I expected. I was expecting a kind of institutional history of the Pentagon. Instead, the book is a thoughtful examination of the ideas and policies of the U.S. military since the Pentagon was created in World War II, particularly as these ideas were held and pursued by various significant individuals. Distressed by the current and growing militarism of his country, Carroll is asking, "what went wrong?"

One of the most significant players in this history was Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara, a young statistician attached to the Air Force in World War II, went on to become CEO of Ford, and made a name as a brilliant and highly capable and successful executive. From there he was recruited to join Kennedy's cabinet in 1961.

The Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, had been built to its full Army-specified size in 1941, in direct defiance of President Roosevelt's order that it be cut to half its planned size. From the word go it was a cockpit of interservice rivalry. With the advent of nuclear weapons, its budget ballooned in the fear and paranoia of the Cold War.

Kennedy was elected after engaging in the most powerful scaremongering ever used by any presidential candidate. People were terrified of the "missile gap" (which did exist--but hugely in the United States' favor), and the citizens were urged to build bomb shelters for what was increasingly looking like an inevitable and imminent nuclear war. The terror came to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and twitchy fingers hovered on the hair-trigger of nuclear attack.

Kennedy was able to defuse that crisis, but he had a change of heart about talking tough to the Soviets. He came to see it as his mission to lead the world away from nuclear Armageddon. (Looking at it now, I suspect this was the real reason he was whacked in 1963.)

Robert McNamara, for his part, saw it as his mission to bring the Pentagon under civilian control--his control--and to move the "nuclear trigger" out of the hands of paranoid hawks such as Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command, who believed ardently in the preemptive and massive first-strike use of atomic weapons. In Vietnam, McNamara sought to rationalize the use of bombing as a tool, not to destroy everything and everyone in sight, as was done eventually in World War II, but to push the Viet Cong toward a political, negotiated solution.

This idea proved to be a complete failure. Even by 1967 more ordnance had been dropped on Vietnam than on Europe in all of World War II, and the Viet Cong showed no sign whatever of giving up. Meanwhile, McNamara was becoming a nervous wreck. He was weeping at his desk in the Pentagon. Lyndon Johnson was afraid that McNamara was going the way of the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who, in 1949, had degenerated into acute paranoia and wound up committing suicide while under psychiatric care. When McNamara, at a key meeting, yelled and pleaded that the bombing in Vietnam had been a total waste and had to stop, Johnson had him removed from his post. McNamara was 100% right, of course--but the bombing went on.

Robert McNamara is 91 now. It seems that the Vietnam War proved to be a humbling and shattering experience for him: a time when his intelligence and self-confidence met their Waterloo. Or, switching to a metaphor used by James Carroll, he was Ahab meeting his Moby-Dick in the Pentagon, the great beast that he sought to subdue but which dragged him under. The brilliance of his youthful achievements led on to pain and no doubt remorse in his older years.

So age is not any kind of safe haven. Not unless, perhaps, you've lived prudently and wisely in your youth. And how many of us have done that?

beachcombing

2008-05-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

I seem to be back to full intestinal health--praise be.

This morning I continue to type notes from different books--The New Larousse Encyclopedia of the Earth (not so new now; I received it as a present in about 1973), Anatomy of Criticism, The White Goddess. Searching, typing--what am I doing?

I'm not really sure. I'm looking for something, but what? Can I even say?

The first word that jumps to mind is unity. I'm looking for unity. A work of art is, after all, one thing--a unit. Everything in it must belong. How do you decide what belongs? It's partly intuitive, partly rational, or so I find. I think about John Constable, fussily reworking his paintings. I believe that in his masterpiece, The Hay Wain, he painted the dog (walking along the near shore of the pond) in and out of the picture more than once. Not just the dog, but other elements too. Constable had a hard time deciding what belonged in a picture.

A work of art, such as a novel, is like a landscape: it is a visible thing whose features are supported by a host of invisible factors that stretch out into the whole universe. Its richness and uniqueness and beauty derive from the specific conjunction of those factors.

I'm looking for things I can use. I'm searching the most likely places, trying to let intuition guide me as much as possible. For the artist does not create ex nihilo, but assembles things that he or she finds. Creation is a matter of combination. To have a range of things to combine, you need to go hunting.

So I'm hunting. It's almost like beachcombing, or like the old guy I saw in the Hinnom Valley outside the walls of old Jerusalem in 1981, walking slowly down the slope with a metal detector, looking for coins or other bits of treasure not yet found.

Yes, after all these years, still assembling my construction materials.

(not very) sick days as opportunities for freedom

2008-05-02T07:28:00.000-07:00

A quick post, just to keep my hand in.

I have some kind of mild gastrointestinal infection that had me fasting for five days (I stopped fasting yesterday). It's also had me living a less structured life, as I typically do when having "sick days". In fact I'm not sick in any meaningful sense--I feel good--but the break in routine of eating and so on makes the day different.

So I continue to follow my research instincts. I'm making discoveries, which creates a feeling of excitement and confirmation. I try to stay open to my intuition, letting instinct guide me from one book to another, one idea to another.

Is this any way to write a work of fiction? I don't know. I don't know if it's properly known what fiction even means. (I think of my old classmate Don's mnemonic device for remembering how to distinguish fiction from nonfiction: "bull" vs. "non-bull".) Northrop Frye also had trouble with this strangely vague but persistent way of categorizing literature.

So I'll press forward, and let it be what it is.

Onward.

the knowledge hunter

2008-04-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

These days I'm still thinking and reading about as much as ever, but I find that my train of thought is dispersed. I feel less of a sense of goal or direction in my thinking. I have a sense of being becalmed, and am unsure of which way to go.

I'm kept in motion by habit. "Just keep doing what you're doing," I tell myself. "Just keep doing what you're doing."

I feel intellectually tantalized. In some sense I think I always have.

The word tantalize comes from Tantalus, a figure of Greek mythology whose name meant (according to Robert Graves) either "lurching" or "most wretched". He was alleged to have committed two crimes against the gods: one was stealing ambrosia, the divine food, from one of their banquets; the other was the butchering of his own son Pelops and making him part of a stew served to Zeus and the other gods. He was caught at both, and Zeus killed him and arranged a special punishment in the underworld. Tantalus was hung from a fruit-tree so that he dangled in a lake. Tormented by thirst and hunger, he would bend down to sip the water, only to find that the level of the lake dropped away as he did so, returning when he raised his head again. He would then try to grab fruit from the tree, but a wind pushed the fruit just out of his grasp every time he did so. In this hungry, thirsty, and unfulfilled state he would remain for eternity.

To be tantalized, then, means to have the object of one's desire always just beyond one's grasp, and more especially it must mean that it recedes from you just as you approach it or reach out for it.

It's hyperbole of course. But in learning I do have a feeling of forever reaching out, and never quite grasping what I think I'm reaching for. It might be that I don't know what I'm reaching for.

So I play it by instinct. What I read, and what I write in my notes, is a matter of following my urge or impulse of the moment. A hunting metaphor springs to mind: the deer runs through the forest, across country, trying to elude you. It's not trying to make it easy for you; it's trying to make it hard. Very hard--impossible. If you've made that deer your prey, then you're stuck with whatever terrain it leads you through: dense brush, gooey swamp, steep hillside. Now that you've fixated on it, it sets the terms of the chase.

If I get scratched, trip, break my leg, or indeed plunge off a cliff and die, that's not the deer's fault. It's the risk I assume by taking on the role of hunter.

Right now I feel I've kind of lost the trail. The deer is nowhere in sight, and I'm shifting back and forth, looking for its tracks. This is part of the hunt too, but it's an anxious and unrewarding part. Yes, even a tantalizing part.

book kindling

2008-04-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

While checking Amazon.com for Art Spiegelman's book on 9/11, I came across an unusual message from Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos on the home page, announcing that more units of their Kindle e-book reader are now ready for purchase and inviting one to read his letter to Amazon shareholders on the topic. Interested in the phenomenon of e-books, I took the trouble to read Bezos's letter.

As a book lover, I have had mixed feelings about e-books and therefore about Amazon's Kindle. (While Bezos says that the name Kindle is meant to suggest that it will "start a fire" and "improve the world of reading", I have always found that the name reminded me of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451--the temperature at which paper and therefore at which a physical book combusts. It's not impossible that Amazon at some level intended this reference to the auto da fe of book-burning. On the other hand, the most powerful parapraxes--as Freud called them--are unintentional, like the original name of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003: Operation Iraqi Liberation, soon changed because of its acronym, OIL.)

In general, it seems to me normal and inevitable that technology will provide a new way to deliver and read books. My concerns with it are two:

that it will make the experience of reading itself less pleasant

that it will not be secure enough to ensure that authors receive full payment for their work

On the first point, I suppose my concern is that people in general will be willing, as often happens, to trade quality for convenience--even for someone else's convenience. In order to have such a handy and portable device, people may be willing to put up with a slightly inferior reading experience. I think about groceries: how the modern tomato has been bred to assume a more cubic shape so that it can be packed more densely and transported more cheaply, and perhaps also so that it resists bruising. What has been traded is flavor, and perhaps nutrition. In this way, maybe a second-rate reading experience will drive out a first-rate one, eroding the quality of life for us readers.

But that concern is perhaps relatively minor. After all, if people like e-books and e-book readers, whether the Kindle or some other, then they should have them. If there are still people who love paper books enough to buy them, then they will no doubt continue to be printed. New technologies seldom eliminate old entirely, after all. The movies did not eliminate theater; television did not eliminate either movies or radio. The Kindle will presumably not wipe out ("burn") books entirely.

As a content creator, more important to me is the issue of author compensation. The integrity of Kindle files is presumably protected by some form of encryption or "digital rights management" (DRM) which prevents people from distributing the content promiscuously without payment to its creators and publishers. But it seems that DRM systems all get cracked sooner or later--hackers often regard it as a point of honor to do so. And there are those who think that once a file has been acquired, it should be free to be distributed on, as over a peer-to-peer network. Preventing people from "sharing" files is an infringement of their freedom!

To such people, I can only suggest that they try writing for a living for a while. If they can't write, they might be able to get a feel for it, as an economic proposition, in the following way. Go to your regular job, full-time or part-time as the case may be. Each week or two, instead of receiving a paycheck, you will receive a ticket to a small lottery that will be drawn in, say, five years' time. After the five years are up, you'll find out whether you receive any money for your work. (The likelihood is that you will not.)

Cracking a DRM system would change this scenario by, essentially, eliminating the lottery at the end. The tickets you've received are for a lottery that has been canceled. Instead of being won by someone (usually other than yourself, true), it's won by no one.

That's my fear.

Still, there are grounds for hope. The phenomenon of iTunes shows that people are very willing to pay for downloadable content, if they want it enough and the price is right. They recognize that there is a principle of exchange, that if you receive something you value, you should pay for it, unless it's been offered for free by its actual owner.

But I think to of how writers have usually lost out, all the way back to ancient times, such as in Rome, where books were "published" (that is, copied by hand and sold) by people who had no concept of paying anything to the writer of the work being copied. Since writers at that time were usually men of leisure, it was not so important perhaps. Ever since then, writers have struggled to receive compensation for their work.

All of that being said, I applaud Bezos's vision for e-books. As an environmentalist I like the idea of publishing works without the destruction and pollution caused by felling trees, making paper, printing books, and shipping them. The costs of publication will drop dramatically, and therefore so should the cost of books. More marginal and eccentric works could be published. And e-books are seemingly ideal for the kinds of things I like to do with books: highlight the parts of interest, and search through them for what I want.

We'll see. I do like Bezos's aspiration to provide any book ever printed in any language within 60 seconds. What's not to like about that? Some books I want now I can't have due to their high price, which I believe (these are out-of-print books) is due to their physical rarity. As used books, none of the price they command will go to their authors in any case. Why should those books, with the knowledge they contain, not be available to us all?

House of War, House of Death

2008-04-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

Two days ago I finished reading the Iliad, as translated by Robert Fagles. Over all it was very good, and much more accessible than I was expecting.

Now I'm keying notes from the book's introduction by Bernard Knox and from its end-notes.

One thing that's striking about the Iliad is its unapologetic and graphic violence. Picking one example at random (there are many to choose from) from Book 17, "Menelaus' Finest Hour", the warrior Hippothous is trying to drag the corpse of Patroclus away from the battle-front:

Hippothous out for fame...Pelasgian Lethus' son,
lashing a shield-strap round the ankle tendons,
was hauling Patroclus footfirst through the melee,
hoping to please Prince Hector and all the Trojans,
Hippothous rushing on but death came just as fast.
No Trojans could save him now, strain as they might--
Ajax son of Telamon charging quickly into the carnage
speared him at close range through the bronze-cheeked helmet,
the horsehair crest cracked wide open around the point,
smashed by the massive spear and hand that drove it.
His brains burst from the wound in sprays of blood,
soaking the weapon's socket--
his strength dissolved on the spot, his grip loosed
and he dropped the foot of brave Patroclus' corpse.
There on the ground it lay--he rushed to join it,
pitching over the dead man's body face-to-face,
a world away from Larissa's dark rich soil...
Never would he repay his loving parents now
for the gift of rearing--his life cut short so soon,
brought down by the spear of lionhearted Ajax.

The poem contains much mayhem of this sort. I would not say that it particularly glorifies violence so much as looks it unflinchingly in the face. In Homer the warriors are mostly brave, but subject to fear and even terror. They fight and kill, but they don't want to die, and when they do they claw at the dirt and clutch their entrails, whimpering their last as the darkness swirls down over their eyes (a common image in the Iliad) and they descend unwillingly to the hated House of Death.

The killing in the Iliad is up close and personal: the result of arduous hand-to-hand combat. I think about another book I'm reading, House of War by James Carroll, a history of the Pentagon. The book's subtitle suggests Carroll's viewpoint: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. The 20th century saw great "advances" in the technology of killing. Weapons became more mechanized even as the institutions using them became more impersonal and bureaucratized, with the soldier becoming subsumed in the growing fungus of The Organization Man as described in William H. Whyte's 1956 classic. The result in World War II was the deliberate slaughter, especially of civilians, by aircraft flying far overhead, launched not so much by individuals as by committees and teams of bureaucrats.

The darkness swirling over the eyes of all those women and children, though, was just as real. When Dresden was fire-bombed people leaped into the rivers to escape the gigantic walls of flames, only to be boiled alive there. They descended reluctantly to the hated House of Death.

People who claimed the mystique of the warrior had in fact become functionaries of the slaughterhouse, not different from the illegal immigrants who work at meatpacking plants, killing animals in an efficient, high-volume process worked out by industrial engineers. What do you do with all that blood? All those intestines and brains? It's all been worked out. The math has been done, the drawings rendered on drafting-tables.

Yes, we live in a sniper's world: a place of killing the defenseless from positions of impregnable safety.

In Homer's world, violence was still dangerous to the perpetrators. But the mystery remains of its mystique, its fascination, the whirlpool-like attraction of it for us primates (for chimpanzees commit murder too). It's a somber puzzle.

looking at evil

2008-04-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

I've sat here for several minutes now, staring at the screen, wondering what to write.

It's not that there's nothing to write about. It's that there seems to be too much to write about. Any topic I might begin with feels like the beginning of a whole journey, a commitment. Everything is interconnected, and to raise one topic feels like it must be related to everything else in order to make sense, or to seem other than merely an isolated, irrelevant interest of mine.

Yesterday I received a new book in the mail--a favorite event for me. This was a small paperback entitled Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State in Europe 1300-1800 by Hillay Zmora. Why this? you might ask.

I was led to it by a particular stream of thought. Following the stream backwards, or, I suppose, upstream: I had arrived at an interest in the idea of aristocracy or a ruling class. The notion of a ruling class seemed to have arisen from the distinction between warriors and producers or farmers. This in turn seemed to have arisen from the emergence of distinct ways of life on two different kinds of landscape: the fertile ground of riverbanks for farmers, and the arid land of the steppes for warriors, who were nomadic pastoralists. Farming and pastoralism in turn seemed to be the evolved extensions of plant-gathering on the one hand and hunting on the other. These different economic activities were respectively engaged in by women and by men, and arose in their turn from more primitive foraging and scavenging. Our early and pre-human ancestors made their living by finding plants and meat to eat where they could.

Why was I interested in all this in the first place? I was investigating the question of evil: what is it, where did it come from? Is its origin in the brutality and hard-heartedness of pastoralism, in which herdsmen round up animals and slaughter them? Exploiting the weak and dumb in order to survive--and then transferring that attitude to one's fellow creatures, and developing an ethos of superiority based on physical prowess and violence? The ruling class.

Cats prey on mice, and mice don't like it. Does that make cats evil? Do they not deserve to live too? Nature seems not to have taken an opinion on good and evil. Does that mean they don't exist?

I'm concerned about the evils of our own time, and of the past century. The rise of mechanized weapons and mechanized bureaucracy seems to have created fertile fields for evil inflicted on a mass scale. Was this inevitable? If so, why? If not, why did it happen? Why is it still happening?

Hillay Zmora, in his book, starts out by saying that the modern European state, founded on human rights and the rule of law, was born from the violence of relentless warfare that had to be financed. Raising money for war was the basis of the modern state.

Yes, I'm curious about these things--they trouble me, and I'm going to keep looking.

cold 'n' sleepless

2008-04-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

It's a cold spring: 0° C when I switched on the radio at 5:40. I'd been awake since 3:00. Now it's sunny out there: like a bright winter's day.

Today I have yet another dental appointment--another in the chain of data-gathering sessions about my mouth that seems to be the bedrock of modern dentistry. Since I have some (very slight) unexplained pain in a lower back molar, it's time to use this brute-strength approach.

So just a short "placeholder" post for today, while I go about the business of living my life. Perchance a nap later on...

new bookcase, new book

2008-04-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was sunny but still unusually cold. I spent most of the afternoon assembling the Billy bookcase Kimmie and I bought at Ikea last weekend and then rearranging my bookshelves. The task was bigger than I'd expected, and I wound up losing patience and just stuffing books in wherever I could. But my office is clear again of tottering stacks of books on chairs, desk, and floor. I love it.

At reading-time I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the stack of books I've got on the go--a feeling that comes over me from time to time. I take it as a sign of the shifting wind of my interests. I read a passage of the Iliad, then a few pages of House of War by James Carroll. But I didn't really feel like reading anything else that I had on the coffee-table.

I let my mind wander over subjects: what's missing in my reading diet? Science? What kind of science? Psychology?

Very quickly my mind zoomed in on the book Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye, a lavender-colored paperback I got in February. Could that be it?

Trusting my hunch, I came down to the new bookcase (located in the empty windowless room where we keep our freezer) and collected the book. I started reading, and found myself immediately absorbed. Yes: this was just the thing.

Many years ago I was given a book by Northrop Frye, The Great Code, as a gift from our friends the Burts. I still haven't read it. Anatomy of Criticism is, I think, his most famous work, one in which he sketches an outline for a "science" of literary criticism. I decided to buy it when I found it referred to in a work on the epic genre. Apparently Frye said that epics are created by authors at times of greatest stress in their lives. I wanted to find out what else he may have to say about them.

Right from the start I felt myself in sympathy with Frye and enjoying the way his mind works. His "Polemical Introduction" to the book starts thus:

This book consists of "essays," in the word's original sense of a trial or incomplete attempt, on the possibility of a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism.

Whew, a bold agenda, right in the first sentence. But what really hooked me was this sentence, toward the end of his long opening paragraph:

My approach is based on Matthew Arnold's precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been much endeavor and little attempt at perspective.

Fantastic! I found this sentence provocative and stimulating. What is it about it that I find so appealing?

It's the conjunction of "much endeavor" and "free play". This, I'm sure, is how valuable discoveries are made. You work hard at something, but unsystematically, because it doesn't yet have a system. One things follows on another, and you just attend to those things. Then, after a time, you gain an unconscious familiarity with the subject. Your conscious effort impregnates your unconscious, and you feel its stirrings in hunches and creative ideas. In that condition, that tension, the imagination can burst forth with new things.

This is another variant of the relationship of research to creative writing, I think. You learn and learn, maybe without much system, and then ideas start coming. You have the materials with which to create.

As I read I found myself laughing out loud at some of Frye's dry witticisms--rare for me while reading.

Yes, it was just the thing.

morphing

2008-04-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

Something within me has changed in the last few months. It's hard to pinpoint what it is. It shows up in my attitude to various things.

One is my novel and would-be novel series. I feel a deeper sense of seriousness and uniqueness in what I'm doing, along with a reduced feeling of confidence about how to execute it. Maybe this is, in my own field, an instance of what Joseph Campbell felt to be the spiritual story of the modern Western person, the image of which was given in the Grail romances: the questing knight, plunging into the forest right where it was thickest, away from any existing track. The idea was that one's adventure would be unique, unprecedented, and entirely one's own.

Every created work is a combination of the familiar and the new. The proportion of the two is one way in which its uniqueness is expressed. But then there is the mark of quality in all artistic creation, which can be summarized as "making the familiar seem strange, and the strange seem familiar." If the artist can do this, then the whole work, in every detail, will have the feeling of freshness and originality.

I think I'm becoming uncomfortably aware of how, in the past, or up until now, I have consciously or unconsciously borrowed methods and ideas from other works, maybe in the hope of "fitting in" or being accepted. I'm feeling an increased desire to get away from that--and also a certain anxiety about how to do so.

In this blog too I feel a new uncertainty. Maybe this is like being in the Arctic, when, if you get far enough north, your compass is no good, pointing more west, say, than north--or maybe even just wavering ambiguously here and there. With your compass out of commission, which way do you go? What guides you?

Whatever it is, you're not taking responsibility for it--you can't blame your compass. So with the blog, I'm just typing what comes to mind. I feel a lack of direction, and that sense of waiting or nervousness before a new direction shows itself.

In my worldly outlook, I find myself becoming politically radicalized. I don't mean a turn to communism or anarchy or anything like that. Rather, a sense that the world situation, particularly with regard to climate and the environment, is in crisis, and in crisis a merely incremental approach is not appropriate. Vision and boldness are needed: deep, confident change. If ever there was a time for political radicalism on a worldwide scale, it is now. Nationalism, the Black Plague of the 20th century, may finish us off in the 21st.

So there you have it: a serious set of thoughts. The writer is morphing...but into what? Into himself.

the long-distance blogger

2008-04-17T07:20:00.001-07:00

The third anniversary of this blog came and went last month without my noticing it. Three years on, do I feel that it is fulfilling its mission? Do I even know what that mission is?

It began as an experiment. Indeed, I think I might have set it up originally in order just to have an identity on blogger.com, in order to leave a comment on someone else's blog. I quickly filled in the forms and set it up, not thinking I would actually use it and maintain it.

Now look at me. I think my original thought was that a blog might help save me from laboring in utter obscurity. I would have a way of expressing the experience of working on a large, complex creative project, and maybe some people would take an interest in that.

I didn't realize how popular blogging was or would become. I've heard figures like 40 million as the number of blogs online. A few of them have real, undeniable value (I think about the pseudonymous blog called Baghdad Burning, written by a young woman in war-torn Baghdad, offering an inside view of Iraq unavailable even through the best professional journalists). The great, oceanic majority are like the parody of blogs and bloggers I saw in a segment on the Rick Mercer Report on CBC: nerds in dark rooms who have no life, typing about the pizza they're eating and uploading digital pictures of the pizza for others to look at, while also requesting that they create links to his blog in their own blogs.

Is this me? I felt a little bit uncomfortable as I watched the segment.

I do have one edge over the majority of bloggers: I can write. So I've got that going for me.

But as for whether this blog adequately documents the creative process, or whether that process (my process anyway) is worth documenting, I can't say. There is a self-absorbed quality to a personal blog such as this that is perhaps not entirely wholesome.

In the end though I suppose it's not for me to judge. I do have family and friends who check in on the blog, and that for me is reason enough to keep up with it. There are also others who have taken an interest over the past three years, traveling along with it for a time. I've enjoyed that attention. Then there are those who, for better or for worse, have landed on the blog after making online searches for specific kinds of information. Common searches that lead here are for information on "Shantaram characters", or the word-counts of specific books such as War and Peace or Gravity's Rainbow, or the symbolism of hermaphrodites in dreams--among various other things. The idea that people come here looking for factual information gives me a feeling of responsibility; I worry a bit about shooting off my mouth.

Mainly I feel that the blog is a document of how long this project is taking. I recall a book that used to be on the shelf when I was growing up: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. I never read it, but I found the title haunting. The blog, I suppose, is an effort to mitigate the solitude of the creative work, and in that respect it may have some slight effect.

But it is only slight. It is a long distance, and it is, in some sense, lonely.

one book leads to another

2008-04-16T07:11:00.001-07:00

In my life, one book leads to another. Occasionally I might stroll through a bookstore and pick up a book that happens to catch my fancy, or find a book through some other more or less serendipitous means (I recently got the Maus comics after seeing their author-artist, Art Spiegelman, interviewed on TV), but that is increasingly unusual.

More often I acquire books as part of following a line of thought or investigation. Take Systems of Survival by Jane Jacobs, a book that I recently took down from my shelf to read again. I first bought and read it in March 1997 (I inscribe the purchase date inside each book). The book, written (unusually for Jacobs) in the form of a Socratic dialogue between modern characters in New York, is, as its subtitle says, A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

I was led back to it as part of my investigation into good and evil. What's good and what's bad--and why? What exactly is evil?

In the ancient world there were natural evils--that is, natural events that were regarded as evil, such as famines or floods. To me these are more what I would call misfortunes or disasters. Painful and unwanted, yes--but not evil in the same sense as the deliberate and unjust infliction of harm by one person on another. The cruel treatment of the helpless and innocent seems especially evil. Where does it come from? Why does it happen?

Following the thread of this line of thinking back, I recall reading in John Keegan's A History of Warfare that the phenomenon of the mounted warrior arose in the steppes of Central Eurasia sometime around 3000 BC. These people were nomadic pastoralists who gained most of their living from herding and hunting animals. To round up and slaughter defenseless animals requires a certain hardening of the heart, and Keegan observes that the techniques of wrangling herds were exactly the same techniques used by these nomadic warriors in combat: driving and encircling foot soldiers, and then slaughtering them. The feeling of superiority that the mounted warrior felt over his livestock was transferred to his similarly unmounted enemies. They were weak, passive creatures to be controlled and killed for his benefit.

Then I recalled reading in Mary Boyce's book Zoroastrians that it's possible that Zarathustra, the great Indo-Iranian prophet of (possibly) 1500 BC, received his revelation of the cosmic warfare of good and evil in response to his experience of these same mounted (or in his period, chariot-driving) warriors, who mercilessly pillaged peaceful farmers on the steppes.

Another input: in Vintage: The Story of Wine, by Hugh Johnson, I read that the ancient practice of dining while reclining on couches--the eating style of the nobility throughout the Mediterranean world--was acquired from the nomadic tribes of the steppes and deserts. It struck me that the mounted warrior, that creature of the steppes of Central Eurasia, who eventually morphed into the medieval knight, was the basis of what we call the aristocracy or the ruling class. By virtue of their mental toughness and superior prowess, they have the ability and the right to rule over those who are not of their class. Farmers produce wealth, warriors take it.

These thoughts led me to reading up on the steppe cultures of Central Eurasia, but then I also remembered Jane Jacobs's book on morality. She discovered that there are two different and mutually exclusive moral "syndromes" in the public world: one which she called the Commercial Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of people in industry and trade; and one called the Guardian Moral Syndrome, which governs the affairs of those in government, politics, and the military.

These two syndromes are mutually dependent in a functioning, thriving society, but what is "good" in one part of the system is "bad" in the other part. Jacobs lists 15 "precepts" that make up each of the syndromes, and the first precept of the Commercial Syndrome is "Shun force". The first precept of the Guardian Syndrome is "Shun trading". Merchants trade, and it's wrong for them to engage in the coercion of force; guardians (that is, police, soldiers, etc.) use force to achieve their aims, and it's wrong for them to engage in trade. When a merchant uses force, or a cop sells things, you have wrongs such as extortion and corruption.

This is the merest outline. My point is that one book leads to another for me, a flow, like one neuron lighting up the next in a train of thought in the brain.

on (not) wasting time

2008-04-15T07:18:00.000-07:00

I awoke at about 3:45 this morning and lay awake.

Without going into detail, there are things bothering me. It happens especially at night. While I might have some qualms about my life situation and decisions during the day, the habitual flow of activity distracts the mind and I'm not troubled. Ah, but at night...

If I look closely at what is bothersome about certain kinds of thoughts, I think it boils down to this: fear of wasting time.

This is not a concern about efficiency. Rather, when I was pressed once to come up with my idea of wisdom, I said this: "A wise person does not waste his time."

What did I mean?

One image that stays pressed in my mind is from watching an interview on CBC television. Evan Solomon was interviewing a former hit-man for the American mob, now living under an assumed identity in an undisclosed location. The hit-man, possibly in his 60s, was matter-of-fact and not shy about talking about his life of crime. He described a few of the murders he had committed--things like shooting someone in the back of the head from the back seat of a car. Once, when shooting someone on his doorstep, he also shot a woman who lived in the same house and who turned out to be a nun.

"Do you regret that one?" said Evan.

"Oh yeah. That's the only one I regret."

By that he meant that all the other victims were also mobsters: guys on the inside who had assumed the risk of getting whacked if they stepped out of line in certain ways. But it turned out he also had regrets over all. Toward the end of the interview, Evan asked him how he would sum up his career.

"A wasted life," the man said.

He said it in the same matter-of-fact way, but I sensed his pain and regret. With those three words he had passed the most damning judgment possible on himself.

I'm not a hit-man, not a mobster. I've done bad things, and from time to time continue to do bad things. But I think the issue of wasting life is not purely a matter of ethics. It arises from a sense that life matters, and that how we spend it matters. Ethics is part of that, but it's not the whole issue. Our mission is not simply to keep our souls pure, but to engage with life in a way that makes full use of our faculties and our uniqueness. Time slips by, and every moment counts. Somehow, it's the very unforced nature of our decisions that puts a heavy responsibility on us.

When I was a temporary monk at Gampo Abbey in 2002, I slept the deep, peaceful, restful sleep of one who had no second thoughts about what he was doing with his life. I knew I was not wasting my time; I was using it to the max.

Now I'm not sure. I'm not plugged in to a structure that has already been given meaning by someone else, so to speak. I'm completely responsible for the meaning of my own life now, and sometimes, well, it keeps me up at night.

a new week

2008-04-14T08:04:00.001-07:00

Another week. I was mighty tired when the alarm went off this morning--more tired than I can remember being in the morning for a long time. It was a tough crawl up from the comfort of the mattress.

This morning I've spent my writing time doing a review of the book The Devil by Jeffrey Burton Russell, which I just finished reading yesterday. If you're interested, by all means check it out.

As for me, it's time to move on to the rest of my working day.

Another week, another week.

an elephant and his beliefs

2008-04-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

My life these days is largely reading--more than it is writing, that's for sure.

I've always loved reading, and I do more of it now than I ever have before. Our old family friend, the late Dorothy Burt, born in 1908, spent much of every day reading for a large part of her adult life. Her day was broken down into the different things she read: The Observer, The Manchester Guardian, nonfiction book, fiction...

I used to think it was a bit strange to spend all of one's time reading and never doing anything, or at least writing something oneself. I think I still feel that way, although I'm less sure.

In my case, although I enjoy reading, I seldom read purely for "pleasure". For me, all reading is study, and that in fact is why I find it pleasurable. Possibly then it's not really reading I like, but learning, and reading is still the most efficient, accessible, and affordable way to learn. Aristotle said that humans by nature love to learn, and that the appeal of art is exactly that we learn from it.

So I'm learning. But am I really? In one obvious sense I certainly am. I do retain some quantity of what I read (less than I'd like). But the motive that keeps pushing me to read more is a feeling of dissatisfaction: that I have not yet learned what I'm seeking to learn.

What am I seeking? I'm searching for my beliefs. What do I think is true? What are the reasons--the real reasons--behind what I see in the world, in my experience?

According to William James, a belief is by definition a concept that we use as the basis for action. We act on what we believe, and only on what we believe. I reach down to my keyboard right now to press keys because I believe that when I do, the corresponding letters will appear on the monitor before me. (So far, so good.) I'm doing that because I believe that when I press the Publish Post button on the screen, this post will uploaded to my blog and become available for people to read. If I found out that these posts were not being uploaded to the blog, I would quite soon stop writing them. My belief would have changed, and with it my behavior.

I look around me in the world and see, mainly, actions based on erroneous or misguided beliefs. These happen on vast, world-changing scales. If, for example, you believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq, as was stated, in order to root out weapons of mass destruction, then that whole costly invasion and subsequent war was initiated on the basis of an erroneous belief. But even if you believe, as I do, that the invasion was for quite other purposes, such as "future oil security", or even "world domination", these too, in my view, are mistaken, since I am certain that neither one can be achieved in this way. Enormous resources are being consumed and lives lost right now, as I type, all on the basis of mistaken beliefs.

In Buddhism, it is taught that we are all separated from complete great enlightenment by the "two veils": the veil of "conflicting emotions" and the veil of "primitive beliefs about reality". Both of these are very difficult to remove, but the first one, "conflicting emotions", is much easier than the second, "primitive beliefs".

It might seem odd that an Indian monk who lived 2,500 years ago would, if he could look at our modern society with its secular outlook and advanced technology, describe our beliefs as primitive--but he would. He did. Our modernity and technology don't touch the issue of our basic mistakenness about things.

Of course, I'm not going to find Buddhist-style enlightenment in books. But I do want to become informed. Even in this relative and temporal way, I want to find out what the true causal forces are working in the world around me. I don't want to act--I don't feel I can act--until I feel I understand what's going on well enough. That means that instead of going out to achieve things, to crusade in the world, I'm sitting in my soft chair, book and highlighter in hand.

I feel like an elephant. It's said that an elephant will not step onto a bridge that won't hold its weight. An elephant just knows. And yet it's probably not just intuition; the elephant must look at the bridge, examine it, and come to a conclusion on the basis of its observations. It arrives at a belief about the bridge, and acts accordingly. I feel that most actions in the world are like that bridge, and I'm still trying to figure out if it will hold my weight.

don't read this

2008-04-07T07:14:00.000-07:00

Back to the grind. It's a wintry day out there: rain falls from a dark-gray sky. I lay awake for a couple of hours before the alarm went off at 5:30, so am feeling a bit unfresh.

Nonetheless it's a new week, and our health is improving. I'm almost back to normal after the heavy-duty cold that passed through our household. Kimmie lags behind me in her journey back to wellness.

Although I've been following the story of the creation of my old TV show The Odyssey, I think I will leave off that for awhile. There's more to tell, but I'm finding that I want to talk about other things again. For those of you who have been following it, thanks for reading, and check in from time to time to see when I pick up the thread.

Last night, on the CBC weekly current-affairs magazine show Sunday Night, there was an interview with American comics artist Art Spiegelman, famous as the author of Maus I and Maus II, a telling of the Holocaust story with the Nazis portrayed as cats and the Jews as mice. I've long wanted to read it (have just ordered these book on Amazon.com). I've always liked comics, and have been a cartoonist myself.

The main topic of the interview was censorship. Spiegelman, as a sometime underground or alternative comics artist, has been censored. He described an instance of censorship to do with a cover painting he did for an issue of Harper's magazine. The cover featured familiar caricatures of various ethnic groups, such as a big-nosed Jew, an angry Arab, a minstrel-show black, and others. There was also a drawing of the naked torso of a woman. The Canadian editor of Harper's asked whether Spiegelman would put black bars over the nipples and genitals of the female body, since these couldn't be shown on a magazine cover in Canada.

Spiegelman, a chain-smoker of cigarettes, laughed. He thought that the naked woman was the least objectionable thing he had drawn on the cover. He thought that the censorship bars over the nipples and genitals was a funny image, and used them for the American edition as well.

Spiegelman is articulate and, to me, inspiring on the subject of censorship. He's opposed to it in just about any form (as am I). He talked about the furor over the publication of editorial cartoons featuring Mohammed in Denmark in 2005. He, like many other people, had to find the images on the Internet since they were widely censored, not just in Muslim countries, but also in Western countries with presses that are supposedly free.

Indeed, the CBC censored itself during the furor, and even during last night's interview used a distorted graphic to "show" the Danish cartoons. Three words sprang to my mind: craven, cowardly, cringing.

I was unpleasantly surprised to hear from Spiegelman that the Canadian big-box bookstore Chapters-Indigo refused to carry that issue of Harper's (even with its decorously censored female torso). As Spiegelman pointed out, that put him in the same category as Adolf Hitler, since Chapters-Indigo also refuses to stock Mein Kampf. Luckily, independent booksellers were there to provide the information people wanted, and that issue of Harper's apparently enjoyed better than usual sales.

Evan Solomon, Sunday Night's cohost, invited feedback on the piece, and I felt moved to provide some. I wrote this comment:

Censorship is the hallmark of an unfree society. Self-censorship is the hallmark of a society that doesn't even want to be free.

Art Spiegelman was an inspiring breath of fresh air--cigarettes and all. He is a self-responsible adult speaking to other self-responsible adults. Let him speak, I say--and let everyone else speak too.

This is a topic about which I feel actual passion. The institutionalized, coercive hypocrisy that goes by the name political correctness is a symptom of a society that, as I said in my comment, doesn't even want to be free. If you can control people's thoughts, their minds, you have automatically controlled their bodies as well.

So I'm against it. The issue with the Mohammed cartoons was fear of backlash. To keep the peace, to stay safe, the cartoons were suppressed in many countries. But I hold with Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I'm afraid we're going to get what we deserve.

still on pause

2008-04-03T07:15:00.000-07:00

I still find myself wanting to take a break from my Odyssey story, and indeed from my blog in general. The household has mostly recovered from the cold we caught, and we're getting back to normal.

I appreciate the interest people have shown in my story, and the fact that The Odyssey still has fans all these years later. It's still amazing to me, and very personally satisfying, to think that our little show has gone all around the world, and has been watched by millions of people--and possibly continues to be watched to this day. I'd love for it to be out on DVD, but I fear this will not happen on a large scale, since the rights to the show were sold on several years ago to a European distributor as part of a package deal. They may or may not even be aware that the show exists!

Thanks for reading, folks...

awaiting inspiration

2008-04-02T07:26:00.001-07:00

We're getting better. Kimmie prepares upstairs to return to work today. Outside there is early sunshine and the promise of much warmth later today.

I'm still not feeling totally myself, and so will write only a short "placeholder" blog-post today. I need some level of inspiration to go on with my Odyssey story, which does take some effort to write.

Meanwhile, thanks to those of you leaving comments--I do read them and do appreciate them. I may even respond to some!

Liza has asked about photos of North Vancouver and the locations for The Odyssey. While I don't have any photos of filming locations, you can get a sense of North Vancouver (where the pilot and a couple of other episodes were shot--and where I live) from a Google images search using "North Vancouver" as the search key. Here, for example, are one person's vacation snaps of Vancouver and North Van, which give a sense of the place. The Odyssey was filmed in various locations in the Vancouver area.

Right: on with my day. Till next time...

brief update

2008-04-01T07:17:00.001-07:00

The beginnings of what looks to be a sunny, if brisk, spring day. I have another appointment on my long dental odyssey (this is really all about information-gathering, rather than a treatment program--although I have been given a plastic mouthguard to wear at night to reduce the effects of teeth-grinding, a product no doubt of inner stresses and tensions). With my compressed schedule, I'll just leave this as a short post.

Kimmie still wrestles with her long cold, and may take another day off work.

Till anon...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 26

2008-03-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

We remain a virally infected household. I'm in the long tail-end phase of this cold, but Kimmie, after a convalescent weekend spent largely in bed, still coughing her way through the late-middle stage. She'll be off work for another day. Thanks to you readers who have wished us good health.

Back to The Odyssey.

At the risk of sounding whiny, writing a good script is hard. If you have any trouble believing this, I can only suggest that you try it. I speak from experience--not only my own as a writer, but also, during 1991, as a paid reader of scripts for CBC Drama in Vancouver.

The good scripts I saw there were notable for their rarity. As I recall, there were only three, maybe four, scripts that actually aroused my enthusiasm and generated a positive report from me. Two of those wound up being produced--one by the CBC as a made-for-TV movie, the other as an independent feature film. This tends to confirm Robert McKee's contention that good scripts do indeed get produced. He thinks it's a myth that there are all kinds of great scripts out there, lying in drawers, gathering dust because Hollywood and the film business are too schlocky to produce them. Truly good scripts do get produced--eventually.

One of my favorite stories in this vein is of the script for An Officer and a Gentleman, written by Douglas Day Stewart probably in the late 1970s, and, in my opinion, one of the best movies of the 1980s. Stewart had written other scripts for hire, such as The Blue Lagoon, but this script was done on "spec"--speculation, an industry term for a script that is the writer's own idea, written for love and not for pay. The idea is that you write the script, then sell it and get paid.

Stewart himself was an alumnus of the aviators' school in Puget Sound, Washington; it was a world he knew intimately. The phenomenon of local blue-collar girls' trying to catch Air Force officer-husbands in the 12 weeks of the training program was real. He created the character of Zack Mayo, the cocky, lone-wolf martial artist who signs up in search of somewhere he can belong, and by the time he was done he knew he had a winner. He'd written a great script, and he knew it.

He thought, "If I can't sell this script I might as well give up, because nothing makes any sense."

He started peddling the script, but couldn't get anyone to bite. Why? It was the late 1970s, and no one wanted to do another "war" movie. The decade had seen the production of movies like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, and, although everyone thought the script itself was good, all the studios were "warred out".

Stewart was frustrated, because as far as he was concerned, it wasn't a "war" movie--it was a love story that happened to be set at an Air Force training academy. There was no combat; the action never left Puget Sound.

He kept shopping the script. Eventually somebody bit: it was Lorimar, producers of the hit TV series Dallas. They hadn't made a feature film before, but they were jacked on the script and thought it could be a winner. Lorimar bought the script and set about making the movie. It went on to be one of the biggest hits of 1982.

As a writer, one of my favorite parts of the Officer and a Gentleman story was how the filmmakers had decided not to bother shooting Stewart's final scene, which was when Richard Gere, in his officer whites, strides into the pulp mill where Debra Winger works and carries her out while her coworkers cheer. Apparently Taylor Hackford, the director, and others, thought the scene too corny and didn't want to shoot it. Stewart begged them to just try shooting it--to see what it would be like. He was just able to talk them into it. It proved to be the "money" scene in the movie and was probably responsible for half of their total box-office take.

My point: it was a good script and it got made, despite unfavorable headwinds in the current production climate.

Warren and I were challenged with the task of coming up with 13 great episode ideas for season 1 of what was then still called The Jellybean Odyssey. We'd only written a few scripts in our lives up to that point. This was a huge task.

In a way the task was all the larger because we were inventing a whole fantasy world. Writing a cop show or a courtroom drama provides certain automatic parameters on what you might write about. This was wide open, and for that very reason created anxiety. When you can do anything, what do you do?

For inspiration we got ourselves a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales and of Robert Graves's telling of The Golden Fleece. Although our show was called an Odyssey, Warren and I felt that Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece might provide a more workable story-template, perhaps because in Homer's epic so many of the adventures involved fantastic monsters--and we weren't planning to do a "monster" show. I've already described how our character Jay started out as Jason, and was shortened to Jay after we always abbreviated his name as the letter J, and referred to him as such. Jason had a definite goal, he had his crew of Argonauts as our Jay had his companions on the journey, and he had specific episodic adventures en route to the fabled Golden Fleece at Colchis on the Black Sea. As we ventured on our own voyage of creation, this was our security blanket.

The stories we read did spark discussion, but in fact we did not wind up using very much from the texts. Gradually it became clear that our fantasy world could not be a place of random episodic adventures ("geek of the week" as we called it). We had to give our world a structure and a purpose; it had to be designed and built, in some sense, as an obstacle to Jay and his wishes. It had to be systematically opposed to him somehow.

Because Warren and I shared an interest in world problems and political philosophy, we tended to talk about these things and get excited about adapting these ideas to our show. Gradually the idea of kids running a kind of authoritarian police state began to emerge. What could provide more conflict and danger for our hero than that? At the same time, what could be more creepy and more comic than the idea of teenagers running a police state? We loved this idea.

In some ways the real test of our series idea was episode 2--the equivalent of a recording artist's "sophomore album" or a novelist's "sophomore book". If you have a great first CD or book, you're under huge pressure to replicate your success with your second effort. Most artists who make a big splash with their first effort fail at their second. We didn't want this to happen to us--and, I'm pleased to say, it didn't.

To be continued...

running late

2008-03-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

It was already 6:00 when I woke up. Apparently the alarm had gone off at 5:30 as usual, but I had slept through it. Kimmie, for her part, now still deeper in the headcold that has invaded our house, had fallen back to sleep.

Bottom line: we're running late. As I look for tasks that I can push aside in order to catch up on my day's productive activities, the blog-post looms large. Perhaps I'll pick up the thread again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, wish us health.

The Odyssey odyssey, part 25

2008-03-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Fall 1991. The pilot episode of The Jellybean Odyssey was produced and ready. The network, though officially never forthcoming with praise (well, except for their own ideas), seemed pleased with it and certainly intended to broadcast it, but not for several months.

This was alarming. Why? For one thing, if the network intended to await the ratings of the broadcast pilot before making a decision to pick up more episodes, then we'd be looking ahead to another year before we could start making--or even writing--new shows. This was bad for two reasons.

One was that our stars were 11-year-olds, growing fast. Every extra month that slipped by without making more episodes allowed them to grow visibly older. If the network really dawdled before deciding to order more episodes, Jay would have sprouted several inches and had his voice change between the pilot and episode 2. The network never showed the least sign of caring about this factor. We knew that if it came down to it, the network might wait two years, order more episodes, then, when told the kids had grown to adult size in the meantime, shrug and move on to some other show.

Another problem with delay was financial. Warren, who was trained as a cook, could get "disposable" jobs readily enough. He was also single and lived (wisely) in humble rental accommodation. I was married and carrying two mortgages plus a personal loan, much of this debt at a high rate of interest. Kimmie was working full-time, but I had quit my job in September 1989, and two years later had exhausted all my savings. I had written a story treatment for my would-be kids' feature film, My Dad the Butler, but the Foundation to Underwrite New Drama had opted not to fund a first draft, closing off that possible revenue source. I was still earning $150 a week for writing reader's reports on other writers' unsolicited script submissions to CBC Drama in Vancouver, but this was nothing like the income I needed if I were to meet my obligations.

Meanwhile, Warren and I, to survive, had drawn advances from Michael Chechik against future work on the show, and had tapped that well as far as we could. To keep my living situation going I juggled, I scrimped, I borrowed. As worries piled up, I would think back to my interview with Sarah Scott Simonson, the psychic I had consulted in 1990. She predicted that I would undergo such a period of financial juggling and dodging, but that it would end well, with my TV show being picked up and revenue coming in. She had counseled me to keep juggling and not to give up.

I didn't plan to give up, not unless I absolutely had to. But in the meantime the uncertainty was creating stress in my marriage. Kimmie was increasingly worried that we were going to lose our house, and all I could offer in response were faith-based assurances that it wouldn't happen--I wouldn't let it happen. And I wouldn't: if it came to the crunch, I'd get out there and start delivering pizzas or doing whatever it took. But neither of us had ever taken on such large financial obligations before, and Kimmie was a worrier by nature. She was doing her bit, but by itself it wasn't enough. I had to contribute. Sometimes the tension was too much and we fought. I had faith in the project, but it was a tense time, much of which I spent with my gut in some kind of knot, and lying awake at night.

Week after week dragged by. The CBC was silent as the Sphinx. Michael Chechik at some point asked CBC's head of programming, Ivan Fecan, about how things looked for an episode order, and Fecan responded, "If you want an answer now, the answer's no"--his way of pushing back against being rushed.

Week after week. October. November. We'd hear rumors of network movement. The new budget year was coming; they'd have to sort out their spending for the coming seasons. Surely soon we'd hear...

Maybe they were going to wait till after the pilot was broadcast after all, effectively turning out would-be groundbreaking TV series into a one-off half-hour, like "What's Wrong with Neil?" All because we were new and untested and unimportant compared to their flagship efforts, like Street Legal. We'd made a good half-hour, but we were small fry, newbies, unknown. We didn't matter.

December.

Offhand I'm not sure of the exact day, but it was probably Friday 6 December (not Friday the 13th--surely I would have remembered that!) that I got a phone call from Michael Chechik in the afternoon. He excitedly reported that he'd heard from the network, and they had ordered the rest of the scripts for season 1 of The Jellybean Odyssey to be written.

Yes!! This wasn't an actual order for episodes to be produced--but from the writer's standpoint it was the next-best thing, since it meant more work and more income. Also, even though buying scripts was relatively cheap for the network, they wouldn't be doing it unless they had a good idea that they were planning to go ahead and order season 1. In short: it was the best news possible.

I immediately passed the news on to Kimmie and Warren. And Kimmie and I decided to meet for a celebratory drink when she'd finished work. We met at Sailor Hagar's, a neighborhood pub close to ICBC head office (Warren may have been there too--sorry Warren, don't quite recall). In the standing-room-only bustle of the Friday afternoon, end-of-week celebration, Kimmie and I drank a pint and savored the exultation and relief of having survived a kind of desert crossing together.

Something I had long wanted had now actually, that day, come to pass: I was a guy with a TV series. We were giddy with excitement and happiness. Never before--or since--had I felt that I'd so thoroughly earned a celebratory pint of beer. What a relief.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 24

2008-03-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

This cold has proved to be tenacious and full of fight. It set the agenda for our household through the Easter weekend. I'm slowly but steadily improving, coughing my way out of it. Kimmie, who thought she had dodged it by prompt and vigorous dosing with vitamins and echinacea, finds herself sinking fully into it--just as she returns to work.

Back to my story of The Odyssey.

With our pilot episode rescued by the expert film editing of Jana Fritsch, the rest of the postproduction elements fell into place during the fall of 1991 and the show was finished. Our producer Michael Chechik engaged North Vancouver composer Michael Conway Baker to score the film (he had also scored our first production, "What's Wrong with Neil?").

I don't recall exactly where or when I saw the finished product, a videocassette of the edited, scored, sound-mixed show ready for broadcast. It was probably in the conference room of the Omni-Films suite in Gastown, and it was probably with my cowriter Warren. But I do recall my reaction:

Wow.

Michael Conway Baker's music added another dimension to the production. I remember watching act 3, in which Jay is suspended over the swimming pool in a modified shopping cart, being interrogated by Flash, bully leader of the self-styled "swimming-pool club". An argument breaks out between Flash and his number-two man over whether to dunk Jay in the pool or not. Michael had put in a kind of percussion cue, like bamboo drumming on skulls or something, that gave it a primal, Lord of the Flies-ish quality. Meanwhile, Jorge Montesi, the director, had given the scene exactly the same kind of edge and menace he would have given to a late-night adult crime drama. The result was hair-raising--it was fantastic. We had taken kids' television to a new place, created a new kind of show--and here was the proof unspooling right in front of our eyes.

As the final shot craned up over the deserted, toy-littered road of the Burrard Indian Reserve, and the three reconnected friends Jay, Flash, and Alpha set off to seek Jay's father and home, with Michael's major chords suggesting a new, hopeful beginning, I felt sure beyond any doubt that we had a winner. Warren agreed. We were amazed and of course proud that something we had written had been turned into a show so good.

It had imperfections, of course, but that's inevitable. In the main, the story takes off, grabs the audience, and doesn't let go. (A year later, our story editor in development, Hart Hanson, who was now also a professor of creative writing at UBC, invited Warren and me to talk to his screenwriting class. To the best of our ability we answered questions about writing and dealing with story editors and the network. Then Hart put in the videocassette we'd brought to show people act 1 of the pilot. When act 1 was finished the class was over and Hart went to switch off the TV, but his class, glued to the set, waved him away--they wanted to keep watching.)

Even David Pears, our local CBC exec, was happy. No grousing about the infamous scene 49 now. After screening the pilot for himself he was able to say with an enthusiastic smile: "It's a 23-minute feature film!"

And the network in Toronto? I believe they were happy with the pilot. They were probably expressing worries about whether the show was "kid" enough--whether kids would be able to follow the jumps between different worlds. This had been a big concern of theirs all through development, and the occasion of much tweaking and rejigging of minor points for Warren and me--work we found to be needless fussing with irrelevancies.

I decided to do a little market test of my own. My stepdaughter Robin, age 10, was in grade 5 at the time--right in our target audience range. I asked her teacher, Mr. Wiet, whether I might screen our pilot for the class to get their response. He welcomed the idea and we set up a date.

So one wintry day I went up to Ridgeway Elementary School a few blocks away with my videocassette, and after a brief introduction by Mr. Wiet, I turned over my cassette, the lights were dimmed, and the kids watched the show.

They were spellbound. Apart from giggling at a couple of the humorous moments, they watched silent and rapt. The only disturbance was caused by the audiovisual-nerd kid in charge of the remote. Because he wouldn't stop playing with the remote, he stopped or paused the episode a few times while the show was going. His classmates and teacher were remarkably tolerant of his fooling around; I wanted to slap him in the head. As I expected, there were no comprehension problems, there was no puzzlement in the audience. They knew perfectly well what was going on every moment. Indeed, some kids were muttering things like, "he's in a dream--why not just imagine a gun or something?"

Afterwards I answered a few questions, but soon I was walking away again with my cassette. I felt perfectly confident that I was carrying a hit show in my hands.

To be continued...

taking a sick day

2008-03-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

My efforts to ward off a headcold have had only limited effect. As part of my low-pressure, slow-motion, taking-it-easy approach to self-nurturing through the illness, I'm leaving off on full blog-posts until I'm feeling sharper again.

Meanwhile, I'm still working: researching, highlighting, typing--all in a kind of gentle mist. Unplugged from routine in many ways, I'm actually fairly productive this way, but only at things that don't demand too much mental processing power.

Thanks for checking in.

The Odyssey odyssey, part 23

2008-03-17T07:19:00.000-07:00

A dark and rainy Monday morning. I realize now, as hoarse cough settles into my chest, that I'm fighting a cold. And fight I will!

It was (I think) September 1991; the main filming for the pilot of The Jellybean Odyssey was done and our show was in "postproduction"--essentially all those things done on a film after the cameras have finished shooting. Primary among these was editing.

Omni-Films had started out as a producer of documentaries and corporate films. Their first feature documentary, Greenpeace: Voyages to Save the Whales, had garnered Michael Chechik a Genie. Our script "What's Wrong with Neil?" was their first foray into drama. "The Fall", the origin episode for our new would-be series, was their second. The expertise of the film editors that Michael had worked with hitherto had therefore been in documentary-making, a type of filmmaking that arguably is even more dependent on good editing than drama, since documentaries are often "scripted" or built or "discovered" in the editing room.

The editing team for our show was composed of excellent editors who had come from documentary-making. And the first cut of the episode was proficient, correct, followed the script, used the excellent footage shot by the director Jorge Montesi--but the story came across as flat and slow-moving. I recall watching an early rough cut of the episode, my excitement at finally getting to see the result of our efforts on a TV screen, and my growing feeling of unease and letdown.

"My god," I thought, "was our script no good after all? How could we have added more zip, more pace to our story?"

I had a bleak feeling that we had not written the script as well as we should have, and that somehow this failure had not been caught or corrected in all the many readings and story meetings over the past two years. It was a terrible thought: our show was less good on film than it was on paper!

Warren and I were depressed. We weren't as good as we thought we were--and neither was our show. And here I'd quit my day-job.

We met with Michael and the local CBC execs to talk about the show. We all agreed that it wasn't firing on all cylinders. It was hard to put one's finger on what exactly was not working, but one thing that stood out was the climax of the show. This was the section in which our hero, Jay, is dropped from a modified shopping-cart into a swimming pool, and remains submerged there for a long time, apparently drowning, while in the upworld his "real" self is undergoing the crisis of his head injury, with his quickly rising intracranial pressure threatening to kill him quickly. We had written intercut shots to an electronic monitor showing his pressure level, and it goes into "alarm" mode when a critical threshold is crossed. Somehow the pace here seemed slow and unexciting, even sleepy.

David Pears, the CBC executive, took the problem in hand. He personally supervised a recut of the show's climax, probably using a CBC editor in a CBC editing suite. A couple of days later I saw the result: a much tighter, snappier, more gripping climax. I felt jubilation--and a jump of hope.

Indeed, I was so excited and glad that I went into Pears's office (he'd left for the day), wrote him a personal thank-you note, and left it on his desk.

Soon Michael was looking for an experienced editor of drama to do a recut, and found one in the person of Jana Fritsch, who had been working on the CBS series MacGyver starring Richard Dean Anderson, which was also produced in Vancouver. Jana (whom I never met) did a whole new edit of the pilot.

Michael slotted the resulting videocassette into a VCR for us writers to watch. What a difference! I was intrigued to see how Jana had handled the material. She cut frequently, most often to show characters' reactions to what was happening or being said in the scene. It created a fast-moving feeling in which the characters were involved with the story. Next time you watch a drama, pay attention for awhile to how it is edited: notice when the camera cuts to characters' reactions. The characters may simply be watching what's going on, but their involvement in the scene brings the audience's involvement. Good directors always film these "reaction shots", and good editors use them creatively to knit scenes together and give them flow and feeling.

When I saw Jana's recut of the pilot I felt I'd seen a whole new show--and a damn good one. There was our script after all! There was our story--the edgy, fast-paced adventure we'd put on the page! We had written it! Jana Fritsch had been able to tell it with pictures.

Now I knew we had a winner--we all knew it. Even David Pears was happy. No mention now of the "tension-blowing" scene 49. Scene 49--Jay's climactic encounter with his mother in a mist-shrouded warehouse--was in there, big as life, and delivering the full goosebump-inducing effect it was intended to have. What a relief. After two years of struggling to get this thing made, what a relief.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 22

2008-03-13T07:24:00.000-07:00

I first became involved in filmmaking with my friend Brad in grade 7. He (or I suppose his mother) had a Eumig 8mm home-movie camera. (Video-production equipment in those days--1972--was large, expensive, and existed only in professional studios.) With this fantastic resource in his possession, Brad was keen to make films, and so was I.

We did some short films and some animation on Brad's Eumig, but ran up against the problem that to make something more than the most rudimentary film, you had to be able to edit the film. Later, as we got into junior high school, we were delighted to find that the school owned a new, high-end Canon super-8mm film camera. Goodbye Eumig--this was what we wanted to make movies with now.

Our real opportunity came in grade 10 in 1975, when, as the final big assignment of the year, our English teacher told us to form groups and create an audiovisual or other media project of some kind. Fantastic! Here was our chance to get our hands on some school time and equipment to make a film!

Brad and I jumped to it and started writing a film script. It would have to be silent, of course--movie sound technology was far beyond our reach--but we could do a lot with silent film.

Brad wanted to do a story around a strange, mysterious instrument that had belonged to his late father, who had been a marine electrician of some kind. Labeled a "field strength indicator", it was a fist-sized gray box with a needle-dial, a single rotating knob, and an extendable antenna like on a portable radio. We didn't know what it was--it was just a device of some kind. As far as we knew, it didn't actually do anything. But from this prop grew a story which we called, imaginatively, "The Device", a Cold War satire told from a Keystone Kop perspective. To give our Cold War story bite, our device needed to be a secret weapon of some kind. We hit on the idea that whoever held the weapon could simply point its antenna at some object, twist the knob, and that object would simply disappear--disintegrate, vanish. This relatively simple movie effect could be done in-camera, and also gave us a plausible Doomsday Weapon for our story.

Fantastic! This would make a cool story--and we already had the prop!

Excitedly, Brad and I spent hours and days in his living-room, scribbling lists of shots on sheets of looseleaf, unfolding our complex satirical farce. At age 16 I was (co)writing my first film script. I didn't know it at the time, but writing a silent movie is perhaps the best scriptwriting training, because it forces you to think of how to tell a story purely with pictures--and this remains the key skill of the scriptwriter, even one who has dialogue at his disposal.

There was no typing; our finished script was a rumpled sheaf of looseleaf pages of scribbled shots, crossings-out, and marginal notes. Armed with this, we innocently undertook the shockingly difficult task of producing our own 30-minute movie. With our friend Tim, who had a job and therefore money, as our third producer, we spent weeks on various locations around the city, mainly in parks, shooting our madcap farce (which ends by "disappearing" planet Earth when a little kid points the device at the ground). Indeed we never finished filming by the end of the school year, and had to show our teacher Mr. Ryan our script and all our raw footage so he could give us a mark.

We pushed on filming through the summer, and continued to work on postproduction in our off-hours when we started grade 11 in the fall. We didn't actually finish "The Device" until we were most of the way through the school year.

One of our production expenditures was to buy editing equipment for super-8mm film: a viewer with two hand-cranked reels for film, and a splicing block that made precision cuts to the film and allowed us to splice lengths of film with transparent editing tape. Finally we had the tools not only to shoot a film, but to assemble it.

Setting up our editing bench in Brad's spare room (which also housed his piano), Brad and I gradually put together the film, adding scenes and sequences as they were filmed and developed. Getting some coaching from my father, we set up our editing room with proper gear such as a board with pins on which to hang strips of film, using a lined wastebasket to hold the tail-ends of longer clips. We cut and recut, winding and rewinding the emerging scenes to view them on our little viewer--the first audience for our growing movie.

I learned that I loved editing film. When you shoot a film, often with multiple takes of each shot, there is no sense of story when you develop the raw scenes. The story emerges--or reemerges--in the editing process. Find the right points to make your cuts, and you develop a seamless, flowing story (provided it's been shot properly). We fiddled and fussed, trimming frames, taking shots out, putting them back in, and rolling the film through the viewer one more time. We discovered that we needed more or different shots, and added these to our list for future shoots. We did one such pickup shot--a closeup of a note taped inside a newspaper--out on Brad's patio while taking a break from editing.

The finished product was very good for a first effort. Although silent, the movie had a piano score composed by Brad and synchronized with the picture via a magnetic stripe on the edge of the finished film--the reigning technology at the time for adding sound to super-8mm. We got our classmate Joyce to perform most of the piano music and recorded it in the music room on the school's baby grand piano, using the school's high-end Revox audio tape recorder. "The Device" went on to win Best High School Film at the 1976 B.C. Student Film Festival, and was an audience favorite at the festival screenings. Yes: people laughed at our comedy! (The festival projectionist said to us, after screening our film, "That must've been fun to make!" We exchanged glances; we might have used the word "grueling" or "frustrating" instead.)

All this by way of saying that I developed an early appreciation for the importance of editing in the filmmaking process. In a sense a film editor is more like a scriptwriter than like a member of the production process. It makes a big difference how a film is edited, and indeed film editor is a big creative credit in the movie business, along with the writer, director, cinematographer, and composer.

Editing was the next hurdle for our TV pilot The Jellybean Odyssey, but I'm again going to have to save that for next time.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 21

2008-03-12T07:22:00.000-07:00

I'm back at my post in the dark of a Daylight Time morning at 7:23, finishing my second mug of coffee, having typed notes from three different books. I'll push on with my story about the creation of The Odyssey.

The effort to make the best possible pilot episode had the crew working long hours and pushing the envelope every day. I remember that on the last day of filming they ran out of time and had to find a substitute location for what was also the last scene in the script: when Jay has been saved from drowning in the downworld swimming pool and has re-befriended his waking-life companions Keith and Donna in the guise of Flash and Alpha. He's got his telescope back, and he's got to get it to his father and get himself home. The three heroes set out down the road to adventure.

Filming here in North Vancouver, the crew needed somewhere nearby. The locations manager came up with the idea of filming the last shot on the Burrard First Nations reserve, a short way along the waterfront from the old Versatile Pacific shipyard. He got permission from the band, and there they went with a crane to shoot the final shot of the pilot: craning up as the three kids walk down a road that is suburban and familiar, and yet also different and hard to place. The set people put an abandoned tricycle and maybe one or two other toys on the road to add a slightly forlorn and mysterious touch. It worked perfectly, I thought.

Yahoo! Our show was in the can! On time and, well, probably not on budget--but not ridiculously overbudget, as it would be if extra filming days had to be added. (I worked on a movie once in the 1980s whose first assistant director at the end of each shooting day would raise his two hands with thumbs and forefingers touching to symbolize zeros, and declare, "oh and oh--zero days ahead, zero days behind"--meaning the show was on schedule, the state he desired.)

We had not only survived the rigors of working with the hot-tempered director Jorge Montesi--he had delivered an excellent piece of film. Because he was in such demand, I don't think he was even able to supervise a full cut of the episode beyond a rough cut before he had to leave for his next gig. But the scenes he had already put together were terrific, we thought. I remember saying goodbye to Jorge at the Omni-Film offices.

"The show looks great," I said, shaking his hand, "it's brilliant work."

"Don't use that word," said Jorge, abashed but clearly pleased. (I'd managed to embarrass Jorge Montesi!) "It was an excellent script."

With that he was gone. Getting the show ready to broadcast would be the task of Michael Chechik and the postproduction team. And it turned out that the adventure of getting our show made was not yet over.

To be continued...

and yet again with the teeth

2008-03-11T07:36:00.000-07:00

Again I'm heading off to further dental work myself this morning (not to worry--no pain and trauma in this case). I'll pick up my story in the near future...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 20

2008-03-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

Last week Kimmie suffered with a dental emergency that eventually resulted in her losing a lower-right molar. In the confusion and derailing of routine here, I got away from my blog. Kimmie is much better now--and is going to change dentists.

I left off talking about the production in summer 1991 of the pilot episode of the series we were calling The Jellybean Odyssey. It was going well, but a nagging problem was coming to a head: the local CBC executive charged with supervising our show, David Pears, wanted a certain scene from the script removed.

In those early days, Warren and I, still ignorant of the filmmaking convention that has a script's scenes numbered only when it is budgeted by the production department, had numbered the pilot's scenes ourselves. The conflict was arising over the scene numbered 49: a scene in the climax of the show in which Jay, undergoing a medical crisis of elevated intracranial pressure that could quickly kill him, has a strange, intermediate-world experience. In the downworld of his coma-fantasy, he has just been dumped into a swimming-pool by the young thugs who have taken him captive. As the pool foams strangely and Jay remains submerged, he suddenly finds himself emerging from a different pool in a strange space--one in which his mother Val is standing nearby. In a calm, surreal exchange, she begs him to come home, and he calmly tells her that he cannot--he has to retrieve his dad's telescope. With that, he plunges back into the water, to be pulled out of the swimming-pool back in the downworld, and saved from immediate death in the upworld.

Just about everyone liked scene 49. Warren and I, the writers, certainly liked it. Michael Chechik, the producer, liked it. Jorge Montesi, the director, liked it. The only one who didn't like it was Pears--and he made it clear that it had to come out.

Michael, in his nice, accommodating way, kept trying different ways to cajole Pears into accepting scene 49, all to no avail. Pears warned him not to waste budget filming that scene, because it was not going to wind up in the finished show.

So, with the show in production and scenes actually being filmed, the argument was coming to a head.

One morning we were to have a supposedly decisive meeting on it right in the suite of CBC rooms being used as the production office for the show. Pears wanted to put the scene behind us once and for all.

Just before the meeting I decided to prepare a presentation. I went to the art department to beg a sheet of chart-paper and a felt marker, and drew a decision-table, using some of my business-analytical skills cultivated in my work at ICBC. I listed the positive and negative features of scene 49 in a kind of cost-benefit analysis of using the scene in the show. Armed with my chart, I went into the meeting, held in a tiny little office, and, pinning it to the wall, made my pitch for scene 49.

I took each of the reasons that Pears had given for why the scene should be cut and countered them with positive reasons why it should stay. Pears thought the scene would be confusing for the audience--they wouldn't understand what was going on. And he thought, most of all, that it "blew the tension" of the whole series--that it short-circuited the goal of the series by having Jay come into contact with his mother. Now it would seem that they had a secret deal or understanding that they were both complicit in his being unconscious.

I argued that the tension was not "blown" at all; the "meeting" of boy and mother was happening in some unconscious, emotional realm in which they simply expressed their connection and love for each other; it was a spiritual scene, with a weird, symbolic setting to emphasize the fact. The kid audience would in no way be confused by it; they would understand immediately that this scene was happening in a special space relating to the life/death urgency of Jay's situation. Scene 49 did not ruin our show--it made our show!

As I made my pitch, I noted that Pears enjoyed the presentation. He seemed to like the creativity of using an analytical chart to sell the scene, and liked being the audience of such a pitch. He smiled. But it was to no avail. Scene 49 blew the tension of the whole series, and would have to go.

Pears's words to Michael: "Pay me now or pay me later--it's not going in."

We on the production side just couldn't accept this. My fear was that in the press of production, scene 49 might become a "luxury" scene that, if we ran short of time or money, would not get filmed. But Jorge had made up his mind on it.

"I don't care what they say," he said. "I'm shooting that scene and I'm cutting it in."

Just to be sure, I showed up to watch the filming of it. Scene 49 was scheduled with other scenes shot down at the abandoned Versatile Pacific shipyard a short walk from my house. When I went on the set, they'd constructed a special pool in a dilapidated, World War 1-era fabrication building. The effects people pumped the space full of mist, and Jorge shot a very powerful and poetic scene. He understood the scene perfectly and nailed it on film. They did two or three takes of Illya Woloshyn emerging from the still pool, each time with crew on hand to immediately fish him out, towel him dry, and blanket him warmly. The scene ended up with Val, played by Janet Hodgkinson, standing on an old staircase, repeating her last words to Jay before he went into the ravine and fell: "Watch out for weirdos."

When I saw the scene on film I knew it was dynamite. To cut this scene out of the show would be an instance of the worst kind of network interference--a deliberate step toward making an extraordinary show mediocre. It was the climax of the climax--the heart of our show! Imagine wanting to cut it out!

As was customary, Jorge supervised the first edit of the show, and put in scene 49. Would the network really make us rip it out?

In the event, talk about cutting out scene 49 subsided. We, the filmmakers, didn't bring it up, and neither, anymore, did the network. I suspect that what happened was that Angela Bruce and the executives in Toronto liked the scene, and overruled Pears. I was just thankful that we'd got it on film.

The film looked great over all: imaginative and filled with "edge". Jorge had brought a nice, adult-network look to our kids' show. The next problem was getting it edited into a workable story.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 19

2008-03-05T07:33:00.000-08:00

Despite some bumps and anxieties along the path of preparing to produce the pilot of our would-be adventure-fantasy series The Jellybean Odyssey, things progressed quite well and soon, sometime in summer 1991 (August, I think), filming actually began.

The director, Jorge Montesi, though temperamental and hotheaded, knew what he was doing and took pains to get the show looking and feeling a certain way. Indeed, it was because he cared so much about the product that he was sometimes difficult for people like me--that is, those who did not actually report to him, but had more of a "staff" relationship with him--to deal with. After all, if someone who reports to you disagrees with you, it's easy to resolve: "do as I say--now."

Jorge was proficient, effective, and creative. The crew was also very skilled and enthusiastic. Often we heard that people loved the show idea and the script, and they went out of their way to give it their all.

Warren and I were pleased and relieved that the tree-fort-in-the-ravine idea that we'd written would be filmed after all. Indeed, the locations manager had found a perfect ravine in a park in nearby Lynn Valley--exactly what we'd had in mind when we wrote the script. The park authorities allowed the crew to build a tree-fort in a tree there--as long as they didn't use any nails, screws, or other fasteners that penetrated the bark of the trees! They ingeniously came up with a sophisticated tree-fort high above the ground, all made with non-penetrating bindings.

One sign that Jorge was serious about shooting the script as written was the fact that he actually used a crane-shot that Warren and I had written in (scriptwriting texts tell you not to put camera angles and such in scripts, on the grounds that that is "directing on paper"). But we felt this had a clear story purpose: a crane-shot going up the tree to the tree-fort, to show how high it was. Thus we hear the dialogue of the boys in the fort before we finally see them--after we, the audience, have "climbed" the tree to get there.

I think they could not get a real crane into the ravine, so the crew rigged a bosun's chair on a pulley hanging from high up, and they pulled the cameraman, Trig Singer, up by a rope while he did a handheld shot on the way up. Scary--but he seemed completely calm. The boys had to be cued to get into motion at a certain point, moving along the homemade catwalks high above the ravine floor. It took a few takes. I was delighted that the crane-shot went in, and felt that it was a sign that our show was going to be special.

Another big item in the pilot was the fall itself. The show's stunt coordinator was the veteran Vancouver stuntman Bill Ferguson. The fall would be done by his own son, who was about 11 years old himself. I watched Ferguson and his team prepare the stunt--they were there for hours while main-unit filming was being done elsewhere. Ferguson's team prepared a large collapsible cushion beneath the tree-fort, I don't remember the materials used now. I do remember that they prepared the stunt with great care. When time to film came, they had at least three cameras running on it. I was impressed by the courage of the young Ferguson, and by the concerned and close-knit teamwork of the stunt crew. It went well, and we spectators burst into applause.

Another exciting part of filming was the hospital scenes of the upworld, when the unconscious Jay is taken to emergency. For this, a real intensive care unit (ICU) was used at Eagle Ridge Hospital outside Vancouver. Sadly, this newly built hospital had never had enough funding to be able to actually operate its state-of-the-art ICU; it had only ever been used as a film set! So the location was real, and those were real nurses moonlighting as actors who whisk Jay into his bed for treatment.

As a writer, it's very gratifying to be on the set when your script is being produced (at least, it usually is, in my experience). You've done your part already; you've suffered and sweated. Now others have to do their bit, and they stride around with colored copies of your script, all marked up with their own technical notes. The actors carry "sides"--miniaturized pages of script, each actor only with the pages containing his or her lines. I ate the snacks, chatted with Michael, who was also more or less an onlooker at this point, and generally enjoyed the status of being an "above-the-line" member of the production--that is, one of the main creative positions, as opposed to the technical and craft positions that constitute most of a film crew.

Filming was going very well. But there was a dark cloud on the horizon. There was a controversial scene in our script, which our local network executive David Pears had decided he didn't want in the show.

But that's for next time.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 18

2008-03-04T07:23:00.000-08:00

Television executives, for all their collective narcissism, arrogance, and power-lust, are actually hero-worshippers and groupies at heart.

Currently, here in Canada anyway, at least at the CBC, they worship a mythical hero called Show Runner. Show Runner is a writer-producer with the godlike power to make good TV drama happen, and above all to solve problems in the hurly-burly of producing episodes. Show Runner can write and fix scripts, and also respond to the needs of production. By applying supreme expertise both in writing and production, generating brilliant scripts while also barking orders at the production team, Show Runner squares the circle of Creativity vs. Business, saving network executives from the crippling anxiety of wondering what they'll actually get after they've ordered episodes for a series. "How will we get out of this mess?" "Don't worry--Show Runner will save us!"

The cult of Show Runner had not yet appeared in the early 1990s, when we were struggling to get our half-hour epic, The Jellybean Odyssey, produced. At that time, network hero-worship was more likely to be aimed at the cult of Director. Director was a hero who, like the later Show Runner, also made excellent TV episodes happen. He did this by applying his mysterious and unifying Vision to the script--a text which had already been perfected through network input. A Romantic figure, he led the TV production team through the alchemical process of transmuting the script into a Wonderful Episode.

For the pilot episode of The Jellybean Odyssey, the demigod Director chosen by the CBC was Jorge Montesi, a Chilean expatriate with a background in documentary filmmaking who had recently risen to semi-stardom directing episodes of serious TV drama for both American and Canadian networks. While the choice of director was notionally the province of the independent producer, Michael Chechik in our case, the CBC advocated strongly for Montesi, and made it clear that choosing someone else was going to be a tough sell. They liked Montesi, and wanted him to direct our pilot.

Michael, eager to please, said sure. In swept Jorge Montesi, who was indeed a Romantic figure, with his long dark hair, expensive leathers, and authentic Latin machismo. Bold, temperamental, and quick to confront, Jorge took hold of the production and set out to give it his stamp.

Personally, I liked the idea of a high-powered TV director making our origin episode. It expressed the seriousness of the network's intention, for one thing. For another, I liked the idea that Jorge was not a "kid" director, but a maker of relatively hard-hitting adult crime drama for such flagship shows as Night Heat--a favorite of Warren's and mine. That was all to the good.

But Jorge was a handful. He gave orders--he didn't take them. To his great credit, he didn't seek to make script changes. He liked the script and intended to film it. But that meant that he had to establish his presence stylistically--with the look of the show. I remember being part of the locations survey, a preliminary tour made of potential locations selected by the locations manager. One of the scenes we'd set in a lacrosse box. When we got to the lacrosse box chosen by the manager, Jorge was disgusted, and therefore angry.

"There's nothing here to shoot!" he said. "It's just a parking lot! It's a crap location--get me somewhere else."

This put him into a bad mood. He challenged many location choices in the script. He wanted to put Jay and his mother Val into a lovely heritage home (all these locations were in North Vancouver, close to where I live). Warren and I tried to protest that this wasn't right--that the working-class widow would not have such fancy digs. Jay should have an ordinary house. But Jorge didn't want to be shooting bland, featureless garbage.

The survey culminated at the old Versatile Pacific shipyard just down the hill from my house: a set of derelict industrial buildings dating back to World War 1, right on the waterfront.

"Why do they need a tree-fort?" said Jorge, who liked the postindustrial desolation of the site. "Why can't they have their club in an old warehouse?"

"Jay's a suburban kid," I said, on the defensive and the unelected front-man for the original vision of our show, "not part of an inner-city street gang."

"Why not?" he challenged me.

"Well," I stammered, "that's just the vision of the show. It would change everything to make him an urban street-kid. He's not written that way. We've got the other episodes to consider. This is a series, after all."

"Not yet it isn't!" said Jorge, with a menacing look.

I was terrified that the show was going to be suddenly transformed into something entirely different, purely due to directorial whim. Later Michael would tell me that Jorge had been a political prisoner back in Chile.

"Yeah, he told me all this stuff," said Michael, "that they'd tortured him--put electrodes on his testicles! I didn't know what to say!"

"Wish we had a set of those," I said.

But here at the locations survey, some other point of disagreement came up, and Jorge snapped. Maybe I'd suggested some way that something could be filmed, in order to get around some perceived problem. Jorge turned on me.

"Don't tell me how to direct! I'm responsible for this show! My name's going on this thing!"

He had his finger in my face. Michael and the locations manager looked on in embarrassed silence. I didn't say anything--it would only have been a sarcastic remark, in any case. I'd created this show and had worked on it for two years; he was a hired gun who'd been on it a week.

I left and walked up the hill to my house. I crawled up to my bed, lay down, and wished I'd never heard of television.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 17

2008-03-03T07:28:00.000-08:00

With the approach of summer 1991, The Jellybean Odyssey, the half-hour pilot first written by Warren Easton and me two years earlier, ramped up for production. Under the terms of the Independent Production Agreement of the Writers Guild of Canada, when the actual filming begins, the writers are entitled to the balance of their total fee, which is calculated based on the budget for the film. For a relatively high-budge half-hour such as ours, this would ordinarily mean a payment of several thousand dollars, but Warren and I had had to tap the producer Michael Chechik for advances against this over the previous year or so, and therefore there was little or no extra fee for us. We had to keep other sources of income alive.

But now there was the excitement of preproduction, including the casting of the show. Michael engaged the CBC casting director Sid Kozak to cast the show, and Michael and Sid thought it would be a good idea for the writers to be present for the auditions of the major parts. Now this was what I called fun: I got to sit in the little office used as the audition-room with Michael and Sid, while nervous actors waited outside to come in and read lines from the script. A video camera was set up to record their performances.

The auditions took place over a period of days or maybe weeks. Soon I realized that Sid wanted me to explain the roles to the actors, so I had to come up with ways to describe the characters quickly so that the actors, who had never seen the script, could find a way to interpret their lines. Most of the auditions were by kid actors from the Vancouver area, although there were a couple of auditions sent in on videotape by Canadian actors living in the U.S.

For the first time, we got to hear our Jellybean dialogue spoken by actors. This was a thrill, but also a humbling learning experience, since dialogue and little jokes that had seemed brilliant to us, the writers, sometimes came out flat and lame from actors who didn't really get what we were trying to say. The key with dialogue, as we learned over time, was to keep it simple and keep it short. Don't count on anybody "getting" what you're trying to do.

So many kids read for different parts, and they were all so different from each other. Their personalities brought vastly different qualities to the different characters. The part of Jay Ziegler, of course, was central. Which kid to choose? Should our Jay be tough and cocky? Wily and shrewd? Innocent and cute?

Warren and I reviewed a lot of auditions on tape with Michael and discussed them at length. Of course, it was not just our decision--the network had to approve all the main casting choices for continuing characters. But we should come up with who we thought was right, and be prepared to defend that to the network.

As I recall, the easiest pick among the three main kids was Tony Sampson as Keith and Flash. He came across as burly and a bit gruff, but also had a sensitive, expressive face and could bring nuance to a performance--he could act. It often wasn't clear with kids whether they were really actors or just cute moppets and models. Tony was a good-looking kid, but not a cutie-pie, and he could deliver a performance and also take direction.

Jay was a tougher choice. From early on Illya Woloshyn was a leading contender, if only because he was so telegenic with his attractive appearance and liquid brown eyes. But to us he was firmly in the "innocent and cute moppet" category--and Warren and I weren't sure that's what we wanted in our adventuring hero. I believe Warren was especially skeptical that such a doe-eyed hug-muffin could carry our adventure show.

And yet the camera liked Illya very much, and his innocence and cuteness made him seem vulnerable and kind of tugged on the heart-strings: you'd want this poor lost kid to find his way home. But was he too nonassertive?

We hemmed and hawed. I think the network liked Illya, who was already a working actor and had some decent credits. Eventually, maybe after some call-backs, he was cast.

The part of Donna and Alpha, the lame girl who becomes Jay's spunky and able-bodied female sidekick in the downworld, was another tough choice. Among the many girls who came in to read, Ashley Rogers (as she was then known) seemed among the least likely: young, small, and with Coke-bottle glasses. But she was relaxed and confident, and apparently had said, before coming in to the audition room, that she was going to get the part. She was a "real" little girl, and very natural on camera.

She was very different from girls like, say, Vicki Wauchope, a beautiful blonde who lived in California and who sent in an audition by videotape. Her mother, who had made the tape, had taken the trouble to shoot Vicki wearing a leg-brace and using crutches, to better simulate the character Donna. She represented the option of going for "star"-type casting for the role.

I remember talking over the auditions with Michael while we were on a CBC soundstage for some reason. Against all probability, we were inclining toward Ashley, up against a field of slightly older, prettier girls--she would be, as I put it, a "more creative choice". We all liked her. I'm not sure whether the network had reservations about her, but anyway, she was the one we wanted to cast, and eventually the network accepted our slate of actors.

The Jellybean Odyssey pilot was now cast, and we had that strange feeling of reality that comes when the characters in a script, who so far exist only in one's imagination, now suddenly have bodies and voices--without knowing it, we had been writing about these people; who knew? For better or for worse, this was going to be our team.

With the cast in place, our show was now almost ready to go before the camera. The next big hire: a director. Here the network had definite opinions. More on that later.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 16

2008-02-29T07:24:00.000-08:00

A subtle but important turning-point arrived for our proto-series, The Jellybean Odyssey, when, in a story meeting held, as was now usual, in the glass-encased meeting-room at the new Omni-Films suite in Gastown, the CBC drama executive David Pears declared that Hart Hanson's rewrite of our pilot script did not have the "Jellybean" feel.

This meant that Pears was acknowledging that there was a special, unique quality to the writing--maybe perhaps especially shown in the kid dialogue--that Warren Easton and I brought to the script that gave it its distinctive and unique style. Now Pears wanted to roll back to our last draft, and get Warren and me to do whatever further tinkering was required. I don't recall now whether Hart was himself present at that meeting, but whether he was or wasn't, this could only have been felt as a slap in the face to him. The story editor in a TV show represents "management" as far as the writers are concerned, and to be undermined or cut off at the knees by management is painful and abnormal. It's a stab in the back--or maybe in the head, from above.

Of course, from the point of view of me and Warren, the creators, Pears was only stating the obvious. As the show's creators, we knew it best and understood exactly how to create its special "flavor". Hart, although he was one of the best TV writers in the country, had not in fact been engaged to rewrite our script because he was a better writer than we were, but because he was part of management's own picked team and therefore would be more ready to take direction from the network. The show's creators, who had suffered and starved for two years now in "development hell", would not simply take orders from the network; we cared deeply about the show and would push back when we felt the executives were demanding things that would make the show weaker and less original. In simple terms, Warren and I were not on the network payroll (were hardly on any payroll), and did not see ourselves as "reporting to" the CBC or its executives.

Notionally we reported to Michael Chechik, the producer. But Michael was the first to admit that he was not bringing a personal creative vision to this series; that was our job. We thought of the ideas, and we wrote them. And right now, this show didn't exist in any other form but writing. At this point, Warren and I were the show. Michael valued our vision of the show and also the way we wrote, and was not inclined to pass on whatever pressure he might be getting from Pears to make us change this or that. At most, if he was getting any such pressure, he would tell us about it candidly and ask us what we thought we should do about it. In his hesitant, questioning, but fast-talking way, he would work through how to respond to the latest network demand or request.

In any case, somewhere in here, probably spring 1991, the CBC took the big step of ordering the production of the pilot.

After pumping nickels and dimes into the writers to output scripts for two years, this was the moment of committing to bigger money. The pilot episode of The Jellybean Odyssey would eventually cost about $500,000 to produce. Even though, in the Canadian scheme of television production, the CBC's share was only 1/3 of that, it was still significant money, and took everyone a large and hard-to-revoke step closer to producing a series.

Of course we were ecstatic. It had been three years since the production of "What's Wrong with Neil?". Now we were having another original show produced, entirely of our own creation, and, with a continuing series riding on the outcome, the stakes were much higher.

Now, after sitting in endless story and network meetings, and advancing small sums to keep the writers alive, Michael would get to put on his producer hat properly and make a show. It had to be done carefully, since many staffing decisions now, such as casting, would have consequences for the continuing series. He had to find a team that could make a show worthy of all the creativity and effort that had gone into its creation.

But summer 1991 was coming on, and Vancouver was a lovely place to shoot film. Once again we could enjoy the pleasure of visiting film sets close to home to watch busy people shoot the lines we had written. As far as I was concerned, we'd more than earned it.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 15

2008-02-28T07:24:00.000-08:00

With the arrival of 1991, Warren Easton and I were again tinkering with the pilot script for The Jellybean Odyssey, and with the other scripts we had written (I believe by that time we had also written the next two episodes, "No Fair", in which our hero Jay is "tried" by a kid-tribunal in his new fantasy world for being "different", and "Out of the Woods", in which he becomes involved in a conflict between a Robin Hood-like band of "outlaw" kids and the quasi-police state of the distant and mysterious Brad).

Warren and I were eager to explore these overtly "political" scenarios of our kid-world, and deliberately turned toward issues of justice, power relationships, and civil administration, shown in the distorting (but clarifying) mirror of our fantasy-kid-land which we called the downworld. While I can't be sure, I believe that this path satisfied CBC head of programming Ivan Fecan's wish for a "relevant" show with a "sociological mission". Our show definitely was not simply "a bunch of kids running around doing stuff".

However, the new tinkering with the material was not bringing us much extra revenue; that had been tapped long since, along with some advances against future work for our show. With my two mortgages, I was heading deeper into debt and had to find a way to scare up more income. Kimmie was of course still working full-time at ICBC; I, the big-time TV creator, was bringing in next to nothing.

One place I turned was to the CBC itself. I found out that the new junior drama executive in Vancouver, Linda Coffey, was responsible for reading and responding to unsolicited submissions from would-be scriptwriters, and that she retained a few readers to go through the projects and write brief reports on them. Probably after one of our Jellybean Odyssey meetings, I asked Linda whether I could maybe be one of her readers.

Linda, recognizing my predicament, readily agreed, and in March 1991 I received my first sheaf of scripts from The Wall: a set of shelves at one end of her office, covered with submissions. From then on, each Friday I would drop off my reader's reports (these documents are called "coverage" in L.A.), pick up a fresh set of scripts, and collect a check for $150 at CBC's payroll counter.

(The scripts I read, by the way, were almost all shockingly bad--not even the least bit professional.)

Another effort I made to keep body and soul together was to approach a newly formed scriptwriting fund set up by the Canadian pay-TV channel called First Choice (the fund was called the Foundation to Underwrite New Drama, or "FUND"--cute, huh?). I'd heard a radio interview with someone who had attended a school for butlers in England, and was now the butler of a rich American family. This had intrigued me, so I looked into the school, and came up with an idea for a kid's movie that I called My Dad the Butler, about a divorced dad who attends such a school and winds up as the butler to a female pop star. While the star visits Vancouver to record an album, the butler's 13-year-old daughter tries to reunite with him--an impossibility in his new post, or so it seems...

I got Michael Chechik to write a letter saying that if this script got written, he'd be willing to produce it, then I sent the proposal to FUND. They responded with a go-ahead to write an outline on the idea. Yahoo! I had another project in development! This project would later go on to a story treatment, and would bring me about $8,000 or so in writing income, all told--a lifesaver. As I told Michael: "the CBC is going to be calling story meetings for our show, and I won't be able to come because I'll be delivering pizzas."

Reading other people's scripts and working on a butler story were keeping my head above water in 1991.

Another thing that happened that year was that the CBC, meaning the local drama-development exec David Pears, got our story editor Hart Hanson to write a draft of our pilot script. Thinking back, I can't quite remember the exact reason why. Was it that Warren and I were "busy" working on other scripts or outlines for the show at the time? Or was it simply a "normal" step toward getting the show ready to shoot, by having its story editor rewrite the writers' material?

For this is how TV series are done: some scripts may be written by writers on staff, in the story department, and some by freelance writers. In either case, the scripts are rewritten by the story editor--who is the head of the story department--so that they all have the same "voice" and conform to the requirements of the series, which the story editor is supposed to know better than the contributing writers. Scripts also change as shooting progresses, and the story editor normally makes those changes.

Hart was already our story editor through the development process, and had provided much valuable and friendly help, in effect teaching us important aspects of TV writing. As a writer he himself was excellent and fast. But Warren and I saw no need for anyone to be rewriting our pilot: it was already good--excellent in fact; even brilliant. We saw this as a step toward removing creative control of the series from the hands of the creators--and we didn't like it.

But no one asked us what we thought about it. We may have created the show and written the scripts, but to Pears and the CBC we were newbies and amateurs, and would have to take a backseat to the "pros" as the show got closer to production.

No, we didn't like it one bit.

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 14

2008-02-27T07:18:00.000-08:00

I think it was in about November 1990 that Phil Keatley left his position as head of CBC Vancouver's drama department and was replaced by David Pears, an executive returning west from Toronto--a move that, in CBC terms and in Canadian corporate and government terms generally, could only be called a demotion. Pears (and I call him "Pears" because that's what he called himself: when he called you on the phone, he'd identify himself by saying, "It's Pears") had been involved in the production of the then-flagship CBC drama Street Legal, often referred to by those of us in the Canadian TV biz as T.O. Law, since it was widely seen as an imitation of the highly successful Steve Bochko series L.A. Law in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Hart Hanson, the story editor for our developing Jellybean Odyssey show, had outgrown his junior post at CBC Drama in Vancouver, in demand elsewhere as a freelance TV writer, a story editor for TV series in production, and also as a professor of creative writing at UBC (whew!), and had left, to be replaced by Linda Coffey.

I don't remember now whether it was our first meeting with "Pears and Coffey", but I think it was: another summit-meeting to talk about the show, this time held, more formally, in the boardroom at CBC Vancouver. Again I (no doubt) packed my attache case and put on jacket and tie (although this time I no doubt also took transit to get there; who needs the stress?). Warren and Michael were there, of course, and possibly Hart, maybe even Phil Keatley. We took our places at the long conference table, sitting in chairs with absurdly high backs, furniture that felt like some kind of modernistic throwback to a medieval dining-hall.

We had all introduced ourselves. In fact I had met Pears years before, in the 1970s, when he had come to visit my father one day in West Van. I didn't remember anything of his appearance, only an impression of someone who thought rather highly of himself and who regarded his issues and problems as very important. Now, in 1990, he came across as an older man, short, with a long gray ponytail and drooping mustache, and very casually dressed in things like jeans, huaraches, and untucked shirts left open to the chest. If smoking had still been permitted indoors, he would have chainsmoked his way through the day.

Pears ran the meeting. His style was folksy, soft-spoken, and, I thought, rather long-winded. He praised our show and its concept, talking about the "arcs" of the series (TV-writing speak for the overarching stories that continue beyond individual episodes) and comparing this with his own experience working on Street Legal, a show which, he claimed, had A, B, and even C arcs running through it--an example of subtlety and depth. (For the record: Warren and I did not think too much of Street Legal as a show; we really did see it as a "me too" imitation of L.A. Law.)

But, although the concept and the writing were on the whole very good, the CBC execs back in Toronto, having examined the material, had discovered that it had a Flaw. And this Flaw was what was holding back the show from being as good as it could be--and as good as it needed to be in order to get a production order. If we could find a way to address the Flaw, then we could very likely have a TV show that could indeed be produced and broadcast. Pears saw his first task with this project as being the correction of the Flaw.

I should've counted how many times Pears said the word Flaw; it would have made a great statistic as part of the lore of the show. It was quite a few times. At length Pears revealed what the Flaw was that had been discovered through the perspicacity of the CBC execs: the Flaw lay in the writing of the upworld.

The upworld, as I've mentioned, was the term we gave to the parts of the show set in the world of waking life--the world where Jay lay unconscious in his coma, watched over by his mother and his friends Donna and Keith. Warren and I had wanted this world to have as much impact, if possible, as the downworld of Jay's fantasy-adventure. We wanted to be gritty and real with how comas actually happen--their real effects and symptoms, and the real methods of treating them, when done in the advanced and creative ways then being developed. We wanted the audience to have to work as hard to follow the upworld coma-therapy adventure as it would to follow the downworld adventure. We didn't want a "cute" or soap-opera-type coma; we wanted to do real coma--scary coma--and dish that up to our kid audience. Why not? They're only one skateboard-accident away from the same situation, after all.

It appeared now that this vision was not flying with the network--anyway, not with David Pears. The next push of rewriting would involve mainly our upworld stories.

After the meeting, Warren and I felt a bit depressed about Pears's assault on our upworld, but agreed that it could have been worse--an assault on the downworld story. After all, when a new executive comes in, they have to make their mark somehow. It seemed the core of the show was being left intact. Pears's enthusiasm for the show idea seemed genuine, and I believed that he saw it as a show that could and would get produced. So it would be worth the extra effort. He had not come to kill it.

Another thing: when I met Pears before the meeting, I immediately recognized him as the figure described to me by the psychic Sarah Scott Simonson: short, egotistical, powerful. We would have to watch out for him. Not that there was a lot we could do, besides say, "yes sir, yes sir, three bags full..."

To be continued...

The Odyssey odyssey, part 13

2008-02-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

The upshot for Warren and me of our meeting with CBC's head of programming Ivan Fecan was that we had to do more work on our would-be series, The Jellybean Odyssey, before he would give us the go-ahead to produce the pilot episode. I don't remember exactly what that extra work was, but I believe it may have been at this time that scripts for the next two episodes were commissioned, and no doubt we had to beef up the other episode ideas further and flesh out the proto-series-bible. Scripts are cheap; the network wanted more security in the project before actually causing film to be shot.

As Phil Keatley, the executive heading up CBC Vancouver's drama department, expressed it after one of our meetings there: "This show, if it goes ahead, is going to cost something upward of a quarter-million dollars an episode. They're going to say yes slowly."

So the result of the big meeting was disappointing in the sense that we didn't get a green light for making the pilot, but it was good in the sense that the project was alive, and indeed Warren and I got a bit more work out of it and could look forward to some more script fees. There was hope that we could turn the work around quickly and get the pilot into production for the summer, when the good filming weather would be here.

But within a couple of weeks of the meeting, I fell sick. At first I thought it was simply a cold, but I acquired a high fever that I couldn't control, and was diagnosed with pneumonia. I spent most of February 1990 lying on my sofa, reading, drawing the snow piled high on my back balcony, watching TV, and climbing slowly and weakly up to bed each night.

This was a setback. But I don't know whether it was a decisive setback in the sense of (apparently) killing any sense of urgency in the network to develop our series. However, for that reason or some other, this is what appeared to happen. Warren and I came to understand more exactly what Hart Hanson, our story editor, had meant early on when he referred to "development hell".

I'm trying to think of how I would define and characterize development hell. First of all, development hell is experienced primarily by writers, and secondarily by producers. The hellishness consists in doing seemingly endless revisions of existing material--long past the point when you've cashed your last check for writing it--and waiting long, long times for feedback from the network, all with no guarantee that the project will ever, in the end, actually be picked up. With no production date even tentatively in mind, the senior network executives, who are all earning six-figure salaries in any case, can let the project float along while they mainly attend to more pressing concerns.

Warren and I met here at my house to work. Often we would walk down the hill to have lunch at Fran's Cafe--a cheap Japanese-Canadian diner near the foot of Lonsdale Avenue that we dubbed the Development Diner: where writers in development could afford to eat. Neither of us had a real job--at least I didn't--although I did have two mortgages plus a personal loan to finance the purchase of my house three years earlier. Money started growing tight, and Warren and I were driven to borrowing money--that is, getting "advances" against future work--from our producer Michael in order to keep going. (He had a sideline of selling real estate.)

Spring passed. Summer. The long days and beautiful filming weather started to fade, still with no breath of confirmation from the CBC about whether they would be wanting our show or not. The writers tightened their belts and looked ahead to another winter.

One day in September 1990 I paid a visit to a psychic named Sarah Scott Simonson. She lived nearby in Lynnmour, so I rode the new (cheap) bike I had just bought down the long hill to her townhouse. Sarah was a very pleasant, ordinary-seeming middle-aged woman who just happened to have psychic abilities. Kimmie had consulted her during a psychic fair held on the PNE grounds, and was impressed with her. I thought, what the heck--I wonder about my future too.

In her little consulting-room I asked her about my TV show: would it get made?

"Yes," she said, "it will get done, it will get shown. It will be successful. Someone's going to come along who will help it get done. He'll be shorter--a powerful person. Very direct. He'll help you, but be careful of him. There's ego there--and envy for what you're doing. Just be careful."

"All right," I said. "I will."

Elated by Sarah's prediction, I rode energetically back up the long hill, again feeling that the wind of destiny was behind me, and that our TV show would finally find its audience.

To be continued...