Writing With Intent: Muriel Spark on Sex and Prose Style

I'm still on my Muriel Spark kick. And, by the way, I did reread The Girls of Slender Means again. Once you start, you really can't stop.

I’m not sure if the schoolteacherish demeanor is deliberate, or just impatient

Now I'm in the middle of Loitering With Intent. Entertaining, of course, but not as easy a read as some of the others. It's about a writer, Fleur Talbot, who finds that aspects of reality begin the mimic events in a novel she has written. And Fleur gets accused of libeling people despite the fact that she wrote her novel before she met those people, or they did the things she wrote about.

It's inspired by the same period in Spark's life as A Far Cry From Kensington, though is more distant from the actual publishing milieu. It does have more sex, which plays a role in the quotation below. Fleur is talking to a frenemy, Dottie, whose husband Leslie Fleur has slept with. Despite their contentious relationship, which involves stolen manuscripts, among other misbehavior, Dottie and Fleur seem entangled for life. But I haven't finished the book yet.

Dottie and Fleur are talking on the phone. Dottie has just said that Fleur's book, Warrender Chase is "a thoroughly sick novel" (and, thus, we are reading a sick novel). In return, Fleur attacks Leslie's own literary work:

I could hear Dottie crying. I meant to tell her more about Leslie's prose, its frightful tautology. He never reached the point until it was undetectably lost in a web of multisyllabic words and images trowelled on like cement.

She said, "You didn't say this when you were sleeping with him."

"I didn't sleep with him for his prose style."

Muriel Spark herself has an economical way of telling a story, a manner I now aspire to, since all too often I am more Leslie than Fleur.

Muriel Spark on getting a cat to aid in concentration

Cigarette, nibbled pencil, stacked books: the signifiers of authorship used to be so much easier….

I finished reading A Far Cry from Kensington, by Muriel Spark. At a point in the middle of the book, Mrs. Hawkins is invited to a fancy dinner party, and finds herself seated next to "a red-face retired Brigadier General" (rather a stock character, which Sparks is totally aware of):

...I said something to the effect that he must have had an interesting life.

"I could write a book," he said.

"Why don't you?"

"Can't concentrate."

"For concentration," I said, "you need a cat. Do you happen to have a cat?"

"Cat? No. No cats. Two dogs. Quite enough."

(I have trouble explaining why I found that sequence of one and two-word sentences so funny, but I read it over and over out loud).

She then explains to him, at some length, how a cat aids in concentration, and at the end of it he says "Good. Right. I'll go out and get a cat."

Then she give us this coda:

(I must tell you here that three years later the Brigadier sent me a copy of his war memoirs, published by Mackintosh & Tooley [the publisher where Mrs. Hawkins works, though not for long, since her bête noire, the pisseur de copie, met in the previous post, will soon put in an appearance]. On the jacket cover was a picture of himself at his desk with a large alley-cat sitting inscrutably beside the lamp. He had inscribed it "To Mrs Hawkins, without whose friendly advice these memoirs would never have been written—and thanks for introducing me to Grumpy." The book itself was exceedingly dull. But I had advised him only that a cat helps concentration, not that the cat writes the book for you.)

An absolutely fantastic book, with a light surface and some darker undertones (typical of Spark), well structured, does not outwear its welcome.

Don't get on the bad side of a Muriel Spark character

I like to say that I like the writing of Muriel Spark, but then, if only to myself, have to admit that this is based solely on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her most famous work, the movie version of which impressed me, at 13, with its sophistication...and, by extension my own, and on The Girls of Slender Means, which I love, and have read a couple times.

Muriel Spark in Rome, c1969

So, feeling somewhat at loose fictional ends, I got from the library one of those Book of the Month Club omnibus volumes where several separate books, complete with their own margins, fonts, and pagination, are squished together between hard covers, as through some mysterious geologic process. This one has, in addition to TGSM, which I plan to read for a third time, Memento Mori and the book I checked the volume out for, A Far Cry From Kensington.

It is told in a slippery time structure similar to the other two I have read, with the narrator (in this case, Nancy Hawkins, describing her life in 1954, when she worked at a dying publishing house) free to hint at what is to come, contrasting how she felt about something when it happened to how she feels about it as she is writing, and unexpectedly telling you a character's fate, or alternately, revealing something about her own past.

She has just met a character who will clearly be significant in her life (although I, the naive reader, have no idea why yet):

At this point the man whom I came to call the pisseur de copie enters my story. I forget which of the French symbolist writers of the late nineteenth century denounced a hack writer as a urinator of journalistic copy in the phrase 'pisseur de copie', but the description remained in my mind, and I attached it to a great many of the writers who hung around or wanted to meet Martin York [her boss, failing and now seemingly committing serious fraud]; and finally I attached it for life to one man alone, Hector Bartlett.

Then, somewhat further on:

Pisseur de copie! Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it.

'Mrs Hawkins, I take incalculable pains with my prose style.'

He did indeed. The pains showed. His writings writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words.

If you are a writer, you might sometimes wonder what the employees at your publisher really think of your work. Perhaps better not to inquire.

Audiobooks, nationalities, and accents

Like many people, I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I tend not to like listening to fiction, partly because I can get tired of a book, but want to check other things out about it. Sometimes a book has interleaved sections at two different times or two different points of view, and only one of them is interesting. So I want to be able to skip and skim. Fellow writer, I apologize, but you sometimes write just...a...bit...too...much.

An example is the much-praised Water for Elephants, by Sarah Gruen. The present of the story takes place in a retirement home, where the embittered older character remembers his adventures in the circus during the Depression. The circus sections were pretty good, but the retirement home sections were insanely boring, much like many retirement homes. Since I couldn't just skip them, I gave up on the book, potentially losing whatever there was about it that people really liked.

Narrative nonfiction is the way to go

So I generally go for narrative nonfiction. Michael Lewis and Sarah Vowell books are both great listens. Vowell reads her own, and also gets various performing friends to do the voices and even compose songs for the audio versions.

I've also recently listened to David Wootton's book about the Scientific Revolution, The Invention of Science. Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's account of the British leadership during the American Revolutionary War, The Men Who Lost America, and Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's account of the history of Bayesian statistics. The Theory That Wouldn't Die, all worth a listen. If you don't think a book about Bayes' Theorem sounds interesting, then it probably won't be.

Do they need to do the police in different accents?

Do you think these guys are Germans?

The last two books I listened to were David Quammen's account of the science and the politics and personalities of horizontal gene transfer, The Tangled Tree, and Adam Zamoyski's history of elite paranoia between the Napoleonic Wars and the Revolutions of 1848, Phantom Terror.

Both are excellent books, but the readers of both indulge in something I find extremely irritating: when directly quoted, people who were born in various countries all speak in the stereotyped accents of their nationalities. French, German, and Russian are the most common.

This, despite the fact that much of what is being quoted was written down, or spoken in their own language, or, if not their own, then a language other than English. Most people don't write with an accent. If they are non-native speakers writing in English, their word choices and syntax might reveal that, but that will be in the original, with no need for the reader to add anything.

It doesn't help that one of the readers manages to mangle Russian names and terms even while affecting to talk like a Russian. For what it's worth, I think the French words and names are better.

And what do they think this is adding? A good reader certainly creates voices for various characters. but a stereotyped national accent is scarcely the best way to do that. It makes the whole thing sound like one of those national-stereotype-filled movies from the 1960s set just before the First World War, like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or The Assassination Bureau. Sacre Bleu (which The Simpsons once helpfully subtitled as "Sacred Color Blue")!

I wouldn't have remarked on the accent thing, but it was two books in a row, and, unlike subtitles in a movie, I can't turn it off.

What do you think about the use of accents in audiobooks?

Or do you think I'm just too sensitive?

The New England Interiors of Edmund Tarbell

Last weekend I took my offspring to the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston. We each had something we wanted to see. My daughter wanted to see the Buddhas in the Temple Room, a tremendously evocative space, I wanted to see the wonderfully named Boston Green Head (a story for another time), and my son, as always, wanted to see the late 19th/early 20th century American art.

And there, I discovered an artist I had overlooked before, Edmund Tarbell (1862–1938). He painted portraits, and a lot of New England interiors. Clearly influenced by Vermeer, he showed interiors much more elegant and spare than one thinks of as characteristic of the late Victorian era, all ormolu and hippopotamus-foot umbrella stands.

The luxury of space. But he has kind of stolen Vermeer’s window.

Here is the one that struck me first, called, with no particular originality, "New England Interior". The light streams through the windows, a cold northern light, shining on the acquisitions of world trade, and doors are open to other rooms, all just as in Antwerp so many centuries before. The elegance and clarity of the space are striking.

Paradise: a good book, good light, and no distractions

Then, one of a common topic, a woman reading. The artists of this school, called the Boston School, loved the Eros of intellect, as do I. Again, a spare elegant interior, cool light, and prestige items of great beauty.

Luxury is not having to have too much stuff

He also loved reflective floors. Here is one from the Met, called "Across the Room", that shows that to full effect.

I hope he didn’t make her stand around like that when he wasn’t painting

Interiors decorated by austere women who don't care we are there was a big theme for the era, or at least a fashion. I like it a lot, and to the extent that I have any acquisitive tendency, it would be directed at paintings like these. Another practitioner was the Danish Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916)—the MFA does have one Hammershøi, which, since it was European, I missed. He also decorated rooms with women, but did not like them as much as Tarbell did. He showed them only from the back, as in "Interior with Young Woman Seen from the Back" (1904). If he'd really cared about this woman (probably his servant, he used her and his wife for a lot of paintings), he would have spent a bit more time on her cervical vertebrae. Though maybe that would have led to trouble in other the rest of the composition. It is an incredible painting, it's no wonder he's so popular.

In general, what strikes me is the proportions of these interiors, their well-chosen furniture and decorations, and the clarity of the natural light. Now, clearly, these were interiors that belonged to men with a distinct aesthetic sense. I'm not much on interior decoration, but these rooms inspire me more than any spread I see in Architectural Digest.

Who is your favorite painter of interiors?

And have they inspired you to do anything about your own surroundings?

"The Favourite": a Glamorous and Savage Look at Court Culture

The Favourite is a clinical examination of hothouse Court politics during the reign of Queen Anne (the first decade of the Seventeenth Century). It is sometimes billed as a comedy. Though it does have some funny bits, it ends in neither a wedding nor a funeral, but in a kind of psychic immurement, so take your pick.

Anne doesn’t seem to have a great grip on either orb or scepter, but that’s just lack of artistic skill, not metaphor

Miss E and I both loved it. So, really, a good date movie. Men, if you're looking for battlefield scenes, this is no Barry Lyndon—incidentally, the first movie where interiors were filmed solely by candlelight, a style shown to great effect in The Favourite. But watching three brilliantly acted sparring women, any of whom could eat you alive, definitely has its charms. The psychic violence is right near the surface. And all the sex is, in some way, also about power and manipulation (once, um, literally). What more could you ask for?

As always, your dating mileage may vary, and I make no guarantees.

Plus, it has some brilliant set pieces, like the absurd dance sequence that shows Queen Anne that she is physically increasingly unable to enjoy anything about life even as it makes everyone else seem like some kind of Olympic athlete. This clip is annotated with what they called the various moves during shooting.

Is historical fiction more like history or like fantasy?

I'm sometimes curious about the place of historical fiction in a world where history is so little known, even among the educated classes. In some ways, The Favourite could have been set in any court, since the roiling world outside the palace where modern science and literature were in the process of being invented never plays much of a role. But the characters were real and interesting, and misbehaving English-speaking royals are always of interest.

Movies set in this era (I'm thinking particularly of The Draughtsman's Contract, an acknowledged influence on director Yorgos Lanthimos) always love the huge wigs, the foppish dress, and the ludicrous and childish misbehavior on the part of aristocrats, in this case duck racing and pelting laughing fat men with fruit. Silent slo mo always helps make these activities seem more compelling than they could possibly have been.

The costumes are inspired by historical ones but have a a modern feel to them. The endless hallways and chambers of the palace have an almost Gormenghast feel to them. A character is poisoned and then imprisoned in a dismal whorehouse (a movie like this could scarcely show any other kind), which is actually the only other interior location shown.

I'm not a huge fan of much historical fantasy fiction, but if more if it was like this, I might change my mind. I'm willing to be enlightened if anyone has any suggestions for me.

How women could exert power

Historically, ambitious women who sought to influence events lacked access to the violence and coercion that lie underneath the exercise of power, and so were forced to rely on emotional manipulation and sex. Men, who did have violence at their disposal, always found this contemptible, even as they found themselves responding.

Sarah Churchill, played with self-confident aplomb by Rachel Weisz, is an actual player in politics, helping manage the finances of the War of the Spanish Succession on behalf of her husband, the Duke of Marlborough, and via her access to Queen Anne. Marlborough keeps winning increasingly bloody and expensive battles, but battlefield defeats are not enough to force France to sue for peace. Parliament is growing restive, facing tax increases to finance an increasingly expensive, stalemated war.

Abigail Masham, introduced into the palace by her relative Sarah, is destitute, without any power at all. She manages to gain Anne's trust and affection, makes a favorable if loveless marriage, and gains power in the palace.

The result is a power struggle for emotional control of the sad, ill, sometimes befuddled, sometimes surprisingly shrewd Anne, who is less easily controlled than either would-be puppetmaster thinks.

The movie gets the hothouse court atmosphere down, though with perhaps a bit more fisheye lens action than necessary. This is the era when once-powerful French nobles struggled for the privilege of collecting Louis XIV's chamberpot. Tiny privileges loom larger than military victories, long emotional sieges can lead to sudden changes in status, and taking your eye off the ball for any length of time can lead to personal disaster. It would be nice to achieve power and wealth some other way, but this is pretty much the only game in town.

A one point late in their conflict, Sarah Churchill realizes something about her rival, Abigail Masham: "We're playing different games". And it's true. At story start Abigail has nothing but a connection to her more powerful cousin. She is scrabbling desperately for survival. Sarah is playing the larger game of state and international politics. In the end Abigail achieves...well, you should see the movie to see what she achieves. It's a brilliant vision of balancing what you want versus what you're willing to give up.

The game is hard fought, and the outcome is in doubt until the very end. And maybe past it. I was actually startled by how much I enjoyed it.

What genre do you think The Favourite is?

I think of it as historical fantasy without the tedious magic. You can pour horror, suspense, and political intrigue into that bucket without missing a drop.

The Return of Accents

No sooner had my written my post on English accents in a performance of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia than I went to a play here in Cambridge, called Barber Shop Chronicles, by Inua Ellams, a relatively young Nigerian-born British writer and performer.

One of the three angles of view

It's fun, with scenes in a variety of barber shops across Africa, with one in London where emigre Africans hang out. The actors are all black men, have great voices, and know how to move, and even how to sit in an interesting way. It's tremendous fun.

And they have accents of their place of origin, some stronger than others. S, one of my long-time theater companions said she had to retune her ear, the same way she does with Shakespeare, before it made sense to her.

In this case, the accents are essential, not accidental. These are specific people, each from a specific place, and their voices show it.

One charming bit of business was that each man, when the haircut was done, got three views of the result. The barber had a decent size mirror that he would hold first to show a left view, then behind so the client could look in the big mirror (us, the audience), and then a right view. Each client examined himself carefully before giving approval. I usually just glance in the mirror, see that my haircut looks as it always does, and that's it. I'm clearly not taking this seriously enough.

They argue politics, talk about women, bitch about white people, and discuss sports, because the same soccer match is on in every barber shop for most of the first hour of the play. There is a bit of a plot, a personal conflict among the family running the London barber shop, but it's not that relevant, and I could have done without it. Interestingly, there weren't any pairs of men who were close personal friends. Men did like each other, but boastful camaraderie was as close as they got to friendship. I don't think anyone would write a play about women in beauty salons where there were no intimate friends.

It's two hours, without intermission, and the time zipped by, so I would recommend it, if you can get to Cambridge, Massachusetts before January 5, 2019.

What's your favorite play that focuses on the rhythm and music of speech?

And that sounds like real speech? I think that was what impressed me the most.

Arcadia and Plain Language

A couple of weeks ago, Miss E and I went to a performance of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, my favorite Stoppard, and a play I love overall. It's about sex, entropy, garden design, celebrity, academic infighting, and the role of technology in what we think of as knowledge. Of all of his plays it melds intellect and emotion most effectively. If you ever get a chance to see it, go.

Thomasina and Septimus

It's not an easy play. Though the staging is relatively simple, with just one set (the same room in two different time periods, 1809 and "the present"—though as time goes by and technology changes I think it will be necessary to change that to "1993") the dialog is complex, something like an Amy Sherman-Palladino sitcom about Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson as malingering coworkers at Chernobyl. I thought the Concord Players did a creditable job.

We attended a Sunday matinee in Concord, Massachusetts. Like most wealthy communities in Massachusetts, Concord skews old. Play attendance skews old. Matinees skew old. I am into my 60s, Miss E somewhat younger, and we were among the youngest people in the audience. This is relevant.

The problem of realistic accents

The play is set in an English country house, 1809 and 1993. So the actors, all of them American, spoke in English accents. I presume it was some general southeast English BBC accent, or at least an attempt at it. I don't have a particularly good ear for accents, so take my judgment with a grain of salt.

Its not easy to do an accent that isn't your own. It's a skill, like acting itself is a skill, and requires a lot of work to get right. English actors seem to be very good at it, so that hearing Dominic West or Idris Elba speak in their natural accent after watching The Wire, where they play Americans, and not only that, but specific Americans from two different strata of Baltimore, is startling. But most actors, even bigshot pros, have trouble with accents. It doesn't help that there isn't a "Southern" accent, or an "English" accent—there are instead a wide range of variations by region, class, and age.

The audience at Arcadia was mostly bewildered. They couldn't hear a lot of the dialog (not enough people admit their need of hearing assistance, and even fewer bite the bullet and spring for a really good hearing aid), and what they did hear they had trouble understanding.

Pretend it's translated from another language

This may be solving a localized problem rather than a general one, but I'd like to see theater companies abandon accents when it isn't relevant to the story. If Arcadia was a Russian play translated into English, the actors would have felt comfortable using their own accents and focusing on the extremely dense and precise dialog. And the audience would have had a better chance of understanding them.

The linguist John McWhorter (he took over Slate's linguistics podcast, Lexicon Valley, awhile ago, and is always entertaining) suggests that Shakespeare should be translated into modern English, since no one really understands a lot of the dialog anymore. In some ways Russians and Germans, who have always loved Shakespeare, understand him better than modern English speakers do, because he was translated into the contemporary versions of those languages.

But it's a bit like translating Thucydides. As I understand it, his prose was difficult and weirdly structured right from the beginning, kind of like Thomas Carlyle, or Thomas Hobbes, who happens to be the author of a really hard-to-read early translation of History of The Peloponnesian War that I somewhat over-optimistically purchased not too long ago. I have not managed to scrabble more than a few paragraphs up its rugged rocky slopes.

You have to be careful not to squeeze the specific cragginess and bagginess out of it, the way fanfic writers and shippers always crush every bit of unpredictability and eccentricity out of the works they insist they love.

But I've wandered a bit far afield here. Accents or not, if you get a chance to see Arcadia, take it.

What accent do you think is appropriate?

Are there works that really should be done in their original dialect, even if subtitles are necessary?

S-Town: the Self-important Blowhard as Culture Hero

In 2012 a depressed restorer of antique clocks wrote This American Life to tell the staff about an uninvestigated and unpunished murder in his home town of Woodstock, Alabama. Produce Brian Reed was intrigued enough to eventually go down to Woodstock, meet John B. and investigate the murder.

The podcast does have a great logo

It turned out to have been no murder. John B. was totally wrong. But, for some reason, Reed found John B. fascinating and decided to investigate other things about his life. and turn the results into a podcast, S-Town ("Shit Town" being John B.'s nickname for his hometown). John B. committed suicide during production, and Reed then investigated that, uncovering John B.'s private sex life, among other things.

Reed affected to find John B. fascinating, and I, as podcast listener, was expected to do the same. Instead, I found John B. to be a tiresome blowhard. People claimed he was a fantastic restorer of antique clocks, a genuine expert. I don't even believe that, though my belief he was a faker even in that is unsupported by evidence, and is just prejudice on my part.

Talking a lot doesn't make you fascinating

We've all met people like John B., always talking about how much they read about all sorts of different topics and how deeply they've thought about everything. John B. provided no indication of understanding anything, and, in fact, seems to have poisoned himself with mercury while doing fire gilding...though that, like so many facts in this podcast, is never to be confirmed, since the autopsy did not check for mercury.

I still listened to the whole thing, because it kept promising to become more interesting than it actually ever did. And Reed is pretty good at digging around, and getting people to talk pretty freely. That's a real skill, and you do get some self-revelation from people, some of whom probably regretted being quite so open when the podcast finally was available.

We may be facing a shortage of genuinely compelling true crime

But the success of the podcast Serial has stimulated a lot of people to create multi-chapter investigations of past crimes and misbehavior. Serial itself never convinced me that its central character, Adnan Syed, was anything other than guilty. The BBC's Death in Ice Valley...well, I don't want to give spoilers, but I found it unsatisfying. These people do seem to play fair: if they are stymied, or can't figure something out, they don't pretend they have, and don't fake any kind of resolution if there is none.

But the problem is a lack of interesting unsolved crimes, fascinating locals, and evocative situations. That unfortunate shortage is pretty much why mystery fiction was invented. John B. is a typical serial liar, always rambling around the subject and trying to avoid giving away that he doesn't know a damn thing. I didn't get the appeal. I don't think the podcast did John B. any favors by exposing him to a wider audience, and most of the controversy the podcast aroused was about the invasion of privacy, not so much that John B. wasn't much worth listening to.

An actually interesting podcast: Reply All

By contrast, a podcast that is consistently interesting and showcases interesting people is Reply All. PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman always seem to find interesting puzzles, and then find interesting people to provide pieces of the explanation. Plus, Vogt and Goldman are incredibly funny, and give each other shit in a realistic and delightful way. I always learn something interesting from them.

So that's one thing. An interesting host (or two), who is skeptical, willing to dig deeper, and doesn't take anything at face value, can go a long way to making the story more interesting, even if sometimes they don't get all the way to the conclusion. In fact, at least once, they've reopened an investigation when they realized they'd actually reached a wrong, or at least incomplete, conclusion.

So that's my prejudice: I'd rather listen to smart people tell me about interesting true things than half-smart people bullshit me about pointlessly untrue or half-true things.

What serial podcasts do you like to listen to?

It's a genuinely interesting art form. Though I think Serial benefited quite a bit from great theme music, and its charming Mail Chimp ad, all of which turned it into something iconic. But don't forget The Nisha Call...actually, by the time it became an issue, I had totally forgotten the Nisha Call, and never bothered to go back and find out what it was. No, I don't want you to write and explain it to me.

The weirdest scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey

A couple of weeks ago, I took my son to see the restored 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70 mm at the Somerville Theater.

It was fantastic. I'd forgotten it started with an actual overture, Atmospheres, by Ligeti. At the Somerville the speakers are huge, and you felt it in your chest. Plus the theater still has a curtain, which remained closed until the famous Also Sprach Zarathustra.

What's wonderful about it is how unconciliating it is. Unlike pretty much ever other science fiction movie, it doesn't seek to meet your expectations, charm you, or to make you feel good about yourself. In fact, it thinks you're kind of dull. After all, you're just sitting in a darkened room, eating popcorn and staring at it.

It has no real characters, a plot whose main motive force comes late in the movie from a piece of malfunctioning industrial equipment crossed with a bad employee ("Open the pod bay doors, Hal...this is going on your performance review"), and ends in a strange sequence that telescopes a man's life into a few minutes of accelerated senescence.

The abominable Dr. Floyd

"I've got my eye on you."

But before we get there, we have to follow the sinister bureaucrat Heywood Floyd as he travels incrementally from the Earth to the Moon and refuses to inform anyone of anything in every place he moves through. I took him for granted when I saw the movie as a kid, or even in college when I saw it again, but now he seems a complete fraud. He has a strained, dishonest-feeling conversation with his young daughter over a videophone. He can't come to her birthday party. One has trouble imaging this fine-tolerance piece of bureaucratic machinery wearing a party hat and blowing a noisemaker at a kid's birthday party. In fact he can barely pretend to care about his offspring--that is, assuming she is not a crisis actor of some sort, hired to create a simulacrum of a real life.

Does this hat make my head look fat?

Floyd then has a strained conversation with a bunch of Russians, who include the only non-stewardess/receptionist women in the movie. These women are also not forced to wear unflattering bulbous headgear like their servile American sisters (as far as I am aware, these Kubrikean bonnets have not yet been used in The Handmaid's Tale). They are friendly with Floyd, but don't believe a word he says. They've all played this game before. They let the somewhat-less-sophisticated Smyslov ("guys always think they're so smart") ask the obvious question about the transparently fake story of a disease outbreak at Clavius. Floyd stonewalls shamelessly. Lying doesn't even give him pleasure, but it's the only thing he knows how to do.

Is it just me, or does Elena look weirdly like Theresa May from this angle?

We then see a sequence of the technological sublime, as Floyd flies from the space station to the surface of the Moon—where he goes to a conference room to give a briefing. In general, the movie alternates vividly realized scenes of space travel with mundane, even boring sequences of people being people in a technological civilization, Unlike the terrified ape men of the opening sequence, they doze off, eat at Howard Johnson's, get tans, and lie blandly to their fellow evolved apes: the ultimate goal of our striving.

Then we see Floyd give a briefing. He has killed men with his bare hands, we just know it. But here he just stands behind a podium and tells everyone they need to sign security oaths, penalty for not doing so unstated but obviously pretty bad. After all, the airlocks all have breathable air on only one side, if you catch my drift....

Then Floyd takes another spaceship to the terrible discovery, along with a subordinate named Halvorsen and a guy who hands out sandwiches. Here we have as blandly corporate a piece of toadying as I have ever had the bad luck to live through:

HALVORSEN: You know that was an excellent speech you gave us, Heywood.
SANDWICH GUY: It certainly was.
HALVORSEN: I'm sure it beefed up morale a hell of lot.

Floyd told a crew if high-level professionals they couldn't tell anyone the truth about what was going on, and then ordered them to sign loyalty oaths. Maybe what boosted morale was the fact that no one was actually detained for interrogation. But these guys know their business. In an organization, a lot of your time is spend assuring your superiors they deserve their positions, and the rest is spent clarifying to your subordinates that they certainly deserve theirs.

Floyd then goes to the site of the excavated monolith, where he touches it, an oddly humanizing gesture, showing the man beneath the functionary. Then the monolith screams, and we cut to Discover One, en route to Jupiter.

We will see Heywood one more time, right when Dave finally eliminates HAL and we hear HAL sing "A Bicycle Built for Two". Floyd tells the viewer what the purpose of the mission is, revealing that no one on board had any idea of why they were traveling out to Jupiter. Poole and Bowman were really professional, because they never once say to each other "Do you ever wonder why the world created a crash program to send us out to Jupiter?"

Of course, Floyd thought he would be addressing the full crew of Discovery, not just the one survivor, Dave Bowman. I can't judge how much any of this can be counted his fault, but somehow I'm inclined to think that Floyd carries a lot of responsibility for how things worked out. However, I'm sure he's already chosen someone less politically adept to take the fall. Maybe Sandwich Guy.

The weirdest scene

What, you thought I forgot about this?

The weirdest scene is the one where the languidly sun-bathing Dr. Poole watches a video from clearly fake parents wishing him happy birthday. It's pre-recorded, and the movie has been at pains previously to let us know that the round-trip message time delay is now over seven minutes.

An even weirder birthday party than the first one

Again a birthday party, again a weirdly stiff, fake-seeming encounter, except that this time only one side is able to speak. Poole watches the video placidly, lounging in shorts and white sneakers and socks. His "parents" sit behind a large cake covered with lit candles (absurd overkill indicating a support crew just out of view) and tell him about other people who failed to show up for this event. Presumably the two of them are going to eat the cake in Poole's honor. They discuss a few other family members, a problem with some bureaucratic form, and then say goodbye. Poole watches without showing any reaction, and without recording a reply to send back.

In a movie full of stiff, by-the-book characters, Mr. and Mrs. Poole are the stiffest and most clearly reading from a script written for them by bureaucrats. Then, after the transmission ends:

HAL: Happy birthday, Frank.
POOLE: Thank you, HAL. A bit flatter please.

HAL lowers his headrest. That is as much reaction as Poole can manage. Is it any wonder we fear being replaced by AIs? Who will really notice the difference?

By the way, the only way I could have gotten all this straight, despite having seen the movie only a couple of weeks ago, was by the meticulous shot by shot analysis of the entire movie at Idyllopus Press, well worth reading.

What struck you most on rewatching the movie?

And if you haven't rewatched it on this latest release, you really should.

Can causality violation save this marriage? Dexter Palmer's Version Control

Version Control

Dexter Palmer

Science fiction is best when it is about the near future, and thus, about now. Too often, we're writing about situations distant in space and time, so characters and dialog have some warrant to be unrealistic. I'm certainly guilty of a lot of that.

Palmer writes better than most people in our genre, and Version Control held my attention from start to finish. Palmer pushes both detailed observation of specific personality types, social and professional milieus, and stages of life, and wider-scale cultural criticism, accomplishing both with real panache.

Is Version Control science fiction?

Aside from the causality violation device (please don't call it a time machine--this bit of fiddly correction is a funny recurrent theme in the book), Version Control has a variety of science-fictional trappings, from self-driving cars to a President who can speak intimately, if a bit salesmanishly, to every one of his fellow citizens.

But these are merely external features, not integrated with the basic story at all. It could have happened here and now, and really, it does happen here and now. A car crash plays a role in the plot, and Palmer has to do all sorts of explaining how it happened despite the safety precautions, but it is just a car crash, something that happens here and now all the time. This is an occasional flaw of various forms of SF, particularly alternate world SF. I remember an alternate world novel where there was a kind of magic, and there was a terrible, concealed disaster at some facility. When you dug into it, it was an industrial accident. Those used to happen all the time. Terrible, dramatic, interesting...but nothing deeply existential. A bad marriage is painful, whether you're wearing a gray flannel suit or a suit of armor.

But adding these kind of nifty (though usually not as original as they think) features is what more literary types do when the decide to "do" SF: what they are really doing is not extrapolation, but satire. There's always a covert jokey element to it, a lack of seriousness. Palmer takes his basic device and the team working on it seriously indeed, but he does not take his world seriously.

Now, a lot of SF is, at its root, satirical. Both satire and SF have reductio ad absurdum as a basic technique. Philip K. Dick, for example, was a satirist. But he inhabited the worlds that he created, and took them seriously as emotional spaces separate from our own. I guess that's the basic difference between mainstream and genre writers. Genre writers like a separate world, while mainstream writers find the very notion of such a world pointless and even ridiculous, and so merely distort the one in which we actually find ourselves, while ensuring that the reader remains grounded in the fact that it is, in fact, fundamentally our world.

The SF elements outside the basic conceit are not a big deal either way. Don't let them bother you, but don't expect them to startle you either.

What I learned from this book

Palmer knows how to pace things. Mostly that means not going too fast. Now that I think about my own work I realize that I worry that slowing down will bore the reader. That is a sign of not trusting the reader. Palmer does trust the reader. The main POV character, Rebecca, gets a post-college slow period where she hangs out with her girlfriends, and then an extended description of how she tries online dating. Each of these sequences is a delight to read, because Palmer observes closely, and builds suspense into the choice of whether to take another drink--even if you pretty sure the answer is going to be "yes". Every little emotional transaction has a bit of suspense, and a bit of a payoff. The pace actually feels fairly quick, because there are interesting little things going on on every page.

Now, I'm not sure how much understanding that is really going to help me. "Put interesting things on every page" is an aspiration, but a hard one to achieve.

What do you think is a diagnostic difference between mainstream and genre fiction?

There are probably as many answers to this as there are readers, so I'm interested in being argued with.

My Boskone panels

I’m at Boskone In a couple of weeks. I’m moderating the Noir and Marketing panels, something I like to do—I like to think I’m a solid, mildly authoritarian moderator who keeps things moving. And the Marketing one will reveal to me all the things I still don’t know about how to promote myself as a writer.

If you go, be sure to look me up.

Angels in Speculative Fiction

16 Feb 2018, Friday 15:00 - 16:00, Marina 4 (Westin)

Angels in fantasy, science fiction, and horror aren't always what you might expect. There are the ones that behave, well, angelically, and the fallen angels — but also bad-tempered angels, angels from advanced civilizations, and more. What attracts writers (and readers) to this motif? What common themes, like redemption or the Fall, recur? Are there novel ways to write an angel?

Bob Kuhn, Alexander Jablokov, Victoria Sandbrook , Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Walt Williams

Future of Noir

16 Feb 2018, Friday 19:00 - 20:00, Marina 4 (Westin)

Noir (the French word for “black”) began as a Hollywood subgenre depicting hard-boiled, cynical characters in sleazy settings. It’s certainly found a new home in urban fantasy. But is the murky world of noir inherently incompatible with the sleek, shiny surfaces of science fiction? Or as our visions of the fruits of science and technology grow darker, does noir have a future as a main strain of SF?

Alexander Jablokov (M) , Nik Korpon , Christopher Irvin, Vikki Ciaffone, Laurence Raphael Brothers

Group Reading: Cambridge SF Workshop

Format: Reading

16 Feb 2018, Friday 20:00 - 21:30, Griffin (Westin)

A rapid-fire reading by the members of the long-running Cambridge SF Workshop, featuring writers Heather Albano, James L. Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Gillian Daniels, Alex Jablokov, Steve Popkes, Ken Schneyer (M), Sarah Smith, and Cadwell Turnbull.

Heather Albano, James Cambias , F. Brett Cox , Gillian Daniels , Alexander Jablokov , Steven Popkes , Kenneth Schneyer , Sarah Smith

Non-Genre Fiction That Inspires Us

17 Feb 2018, Saturday 15:00 - 16:00, Marina 3 (Westin)

We’re always talking about icons such as Mary Shelley, Stephen King, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others who breathed air into our literary lungs — but what about non-genre fiction? Our panelists discuss some of their favorite authors from outside the SF/F/H field, who have inspired them as writers and readers.

Kenneth Schneyer (M), Tamora Pierce, Alexander Jablokov , Theodora Goss, F. Brett Cox

Marketing Uphill

18 Feb 2018, Sunday 11:00 - 12:00, Harbor II (Westin)

Sometimes marketing for writers feels like walking uphill to school barefoot in the snow. Does it ever get easier? At what point is enough enough for you and your social network? What about live events? How much should you invest, and how do you measure the return? Our panelists share their experiences and tips for managing your marketing.

Alexander Jablokov (M), Melanie Meadors, Suzanne Reynolds-Alpert, Joshua Bilmes , Craig Miller

Emotionally out of step

The other night I saw the movie A Monster Calls at a friend's house. It's about a boy, maybe 12 years old, whose father has left and whose mother is seriously ill. He's bullied at school, drifts through is days in his imagination, and eventually ends up living with his emotionally distant grandmother in a house where he is not allowed to touch anything. Oh, and he's visited by a talking tree man from the nearby churchyard who says he will tell him three stories, and then wants to hear one in return.

Everyone else was deeply moved by the movie, and several people were weeping near the end. Afterward, others talked about the good the animation of the tree man was.

I felt like an inadequate human being, because I really hated this movie.

This is not me. Really.Every story the tree man tells the boy, Connor, comes complete with explanatory apparatus that makes clear what wholesome and psychologically empowering lesson the story imparts. Two are vaguely fairy-tale-like (one about a royal family with major communication problems, the second about a rationalist and therefore inevitably tragedy-bound parson, and a sullen apothecary with a failing business), the third just a nub to incent action in the story. And they aren't even stories, really. Without the excess commentary, they are just situations. And they rely a great deal on some nice watercolor illustrations--which Connor, the boy, can't actually see, because he's being told the stories, not watching them on the screen, making his experience even less adequate.

Beware of stories with explicit morals. Stories can bring us through conflict to resolution, but they allow us to do at least some of the work ourselves. At the end Connor is forced to bark out his realization of how he is coming to terms with his own frailty in the face of tragedy.

The tree man...oh, and the animation is so hyper-realistic there is nothing at all magical, ambiguous, or even disturbing about this big piece of shrubbery at all. Anyway, the tree man is voiced by Liam Neeson, who does a good job with some pretty wretched lines. I kept imagining him barking at someone who indicated some doubt about one of his stories, "I will find you, and I will explain it to you!"

 You really don't want him to do that

And he's a yew tree, which finally explains a mysterious verse from my childhood.

So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, adieu, adieu, adieu, to yew and yew and yewAs if the over-explained stories weren't enough, there comes a point where two characters who have been in conflict hug each other in the face of tragedy as "This is a big emotional moment, folks!" music rises.

Well, now I'm just being kind of mean. But this kind of thing takes all the fun out of...well, pretty much everything.

But I do have to emphasize that mine is a clearly minority opinion, among critics as among audiences. I am allergic to overt authorial manipulation, but many people welcome it. But that's an essay for another day.

Recent reading: Lady Susan

In her teens, Jane Austen wrote an epistolary novella. It was published decades after her death as Lady Susan. It's flawed, but entertaining. Lady Susan is a manipulative yet observantly witty, and is a dominating character--no one else in the narrative is of much interest.

It involves money and marriage, no surprise, and is no one's idea of a romance. Lady Susan tries to marry her daughter off to a wealthy but otherwise inappropriate suitor, but her plans are thrown off by her own urge to misbehave with yet another man. A good manipulator is never manipulated by her own emotions, so Lady Susan falls short of the ideal.

Whit Stillman recently turned the book into the movie Love and Friendship (named after quite a different unfinished Austen work, even though there is little enough of either in the book, or the movie). It's a chilly and austere enterprise, probably not worth seeing if you haven't read the book.

It is interesting to read, because it's always interesting to see a writer working with favorite themes but with incomplete control of technique. Since the novel is written in letters, the letters must be written to someone. So Lady Susan confides all her machinations to her friend Alicia Johnson. Alicia has no role in the narrative, save as uncritical cheerleader to Lady Susan, and is give a perfunctory background life with an unsatisfactory husband. She's a bit like a pillar in the middle of the living room put in to support to roof by an architect who hadn't figured out a way to work it into the design.

In the movie, Lady Susan (Kate Beckinsale) keeps popping into London from the country house she is staying in to visit Alicia (Chloe Sevigny, played as American, presumably to expand the film's market) whenever she needs to talk to her, as if there's a commuter train between the two. If Alicia had been an actual part of the narrative, that would have been easier for Stillman to manage.

One thing I really like about Lady Susan is that she is a bad mom. And this is just a fact about her, not much more terrible than her other personality traits. In most fiction, being a bad mom is the worst thing a woman can be. Bad dad...well, hey, that's a hard job, no wonder us guys screw it up now and then. Lady Susan describes her daughter as a bit of a dullard. Mean, but entirely accurate, in both book and movie. She is phenomenally dull. Her only use really is to get married off so that mom can continue to live an overleveraged life.

The story feels truncated, as if Austen went on to other, more promising projects (Sense and Sensibility, originally Elinor and Marianne was apparently also epistolary in its original draft) and never got back to it. Kind of a pity. If Alicia Johnson, earnest confidante, had turned into an actor in her own right, with goals that gradually diverge from Lady Susan's, it might have been quite something. Call it Will and Idea, and scoop Schopenhauer into the bargain....

I read this for my favorite book group, where I always find myself reading something unexpected.

Where I'll be at Arisia

I'll be attending our local con, Arisia, next weekend (January 13-15). I probably won't be there Friday night, but will be all day Saturday and Sunday.  If  you're there, say hello. My panels are:

10 am Saturday Fashionpunk
A discussion of various aspects of fashion and SF, with Chris Brathwaite, T. X. Watson, and Nightwing Whitehead.

10 am Sunday How to Self-Edit That Steaming Hot Pile of Crap
Thrilling editing stories and methods, with Trisha Wooldridge, Matthew Kressel, Jackqui B., and Ken Scheneyer.

1 pm Sunday The 100 Year Old Barbed Wire: The Great War & SF
A combination of works by people who went through that war, and works about and influence by it, with Sioban Krzywicki, Greer Gilman, Debra Doyle, and Sonya Taaffe.

Uncle Vanya and our current moment

Last night I went to a reading group I like, where we discussed Anton Chekhov's play Uncle Vanya, first put on stage in 1899. After rereading it, I rewatched the great Vanya on 42nd Street, with Wallace Shawn and Julianne Moore (the movie has a wonderfully sly beginning, sliding us into the play without our quite realizing it).

It's a play about hopelessness, about an unproductive world in which changing your situation seems completely impossible--and also about the self-defeating personality those circumstances seem to engender. Astrov the idealistic doctor is dissolving himself slowly in alcohol and finds it impossible to make a real human connection. Vanya labors pointlessly for someone he once respected, but his labor is really to keep himself from taking any chances. Vanya's mother spends her time making notes on political pamphlets, as close to an obsessive commenter on blogs as the nineteenth century could get.

A modern restaging set in one of America's hollowing out areas would work perfectly. The frustrations, angers, and acceptance of a humble and undeserved fate would require little translation. Dr. Astrov's big interest is environmental destruction, the effects that destruction has on the human soul, which would also be spot on.

See you at Readercon?

Readercon has moved this year, and will be at the Quincy Marriott, in Quincy, MA (if you're not from around here, that's pronounced 'quin-zee'), starting this Thursday night (July 7 - 10).  I have every intention of getting down there that first night, but it's a farther haul from the house than Burlington was, so we'll see.

My schedule is all on Friday:

2:00 PM    AT    Autographs. Alex Jablokow, Alex Shvartsman.

6:00 PM    5    Author Trademark or Personal Cliché? . F. Brett Cox, Gillian Daniels, Karen Heuler (leader), Alex Jablokow, Bud Sparhawk. Most writers occasionally suspect that they are writing the same type of story over and over again. Some writers set out to do so. Is this a good thing or bad? Our panelists will examine which writers persistently revisit the same images, themes, characters, or situations, and discuss when and for whom this revisiting works and when and for whom it does not. The panelists will discuss how they handle this situation, when they realize the story they're writing seems too familiar. Should the story be discarded because it's already been written, or should a writer continue and try to discover the source of the weird power it holds for them? Panelists will discuss which writers they admire, and what distinctive features make them exceptional and unique. Panelists will also come up with a few strategies to help audience members (and perhaps each other) see their work in a new light, using everything from literary influences to music and movies to dreams and the unconscious.

8:00 PM    6    The Future of Government . Christopher Brown, Alex Jablokow, Paul Park (leader), Steven Popkes. We like to think that US democracy is the ultimate and best form of government, but it has its weaknesses as have all the types of government that came before and exist today. What forms of government are coming? What new technologies, economic ideas, or environmental changes might play important roles in these new types of governance? Was Marx ultimately right and we just haven't gotten very far along his timeline yet? What forms of government have been proposed that haven't existed in the real world?

One mystery: whatever possessed me to sign up for an autographing session?  And they used my legal name instead of my pen name.  There seem to have been some organizational issues this year, so I'l just deal with it.

I hope to see you there.

Why "Elvira Madigan"?

I listen to classical music while I work. Few classical music announcers are permitted much personality, and they seldom say much about the music they are about to play.  Whenver someone plays Mozart's 21st piano concerto, they do feel obliged to say the music (the 2nd movement Adagio) was used in a movie, "Elvira Madigan", and some people call the concerto after that.

It's a great piece. I have a collection of Alfred Brendel playing those late piano concertos, and it's always tempting to listen to more than one. It's kind of a sin against self to listen to this music while doing something else in the first place, but letting these works blend into each other is even worse.

But why "Elvira Madigan"? Has anyone actually watched or even heard of this Swedish movie from 1967? Why do the announcers feel obliged to say this? What are we supposed to get out of it? It's an odd tic, no doubt originating with some marketing person at a record company. People who feel themselves immune from influence of any kind are often slaves of some defunct marketing person.