Now, complete with stories

I finally put up some of my short fiction.  These are all stories I have reason to feel proud of, and which, I think it is safe to say, are relatively obscure.

"The Fury at Colonus" is the Oresteia told as a police procedural, with a Fury as the weary detective.  "Fragments of a Painted Eggshell" is about memory as art, and the issues of good people who, for one reason or another, are just not good parents.  "Market Report" is exactly that:  why are people in this particular suburb turning to the Pleistocene for their entertainment?

The slipperiness of truth

I wrote some thoughts about truth and prevarication in personal nonfiction yesterday, and, primed for the topic, found myself on the train to work reading an essay in The New York Review of Books about the essays of George Orwell, "Such, Such Was Eric Blair", by Julian Barnes, in which he discusses the question of the truth, or lack of same, in Orwell's account in "Shooting An Elephant", about his days in Burma.

As Barnes says, of Orwell:

...he taught us that even if 100 percent truth is unobtainable, then 67 percent is and always will be better than 66 percent, and that even such a small percentage point is a morally nonnegotiable unit.

Then Barnes sets out doubts, about the elephant, about a hanging, even about the wretched school so vividly described in "Such, Such Were The Joys".  The elephant was shot, but had not killed a man, and the consequences to Orwell were negative and damaged his reputation.  The hanging was a "composite", that dreaded journalistic crime that got Janet Cooke sacked from the Washington Post back in 1981.  And the school wasn't as bad as described.

The school I won't discuss:  our experiences at school, or in a family, can be horrible and completely different from the person we sit next to at lunch, or our sibling, so different that conversation about what happened may be forever impossible, outside of novels or intimate essays.

But the other two.... According to Barnes, David Lodge (one of my favorite writers, as it happens) argues

...that the value of the two Burmese essays does not rest on their being factually true.

Except that it does.  It may not rest solely on the facts, because it also rests on prose and structure.  The facts are not sufficient.  But they are necessary.  That one percent does matter.  Even if your readers, even if they are as astute and thoughtful as David Lodge, want you to trade truth for something they think they value more.

Stealing Characters

I recently watched "The Letter", a 1940 William Wyler movie starring Bette Davis.  I picked it up because the culture guide Terry Teachout, who blogs at About Last Night, has written the libretto to an opera based on it (or, rather, on the original Maugham story).

It's about murder, betrayal of ideals, and corruption in pre-war Malaya.  That "pre-war" is interesting.  This was filmed a little more than a year before Japanese forces conquered the entire country, besieged Singapore, and destroyed this entire society. So, no matter what long-term guilts or pains the characters expected to have, they were completely overcome by events.

I get story ideas from movies, more more so than from books.  This happens in several ways.  I always try to predict what will happen next, and if I'm completely wrong, my prediction can serve as the basis for a story.  And I'm often more interested in minor characters than the movie, with its limited airtime, can be.  In this case, it was the lawyer Howard Joyce's legal assistant Ong Chi Seng.  Ong is the one who presents Joyce with his occasion of sin, by offering him something he desperately needs.  It's played pretty straightforwardly in the movie.  Aside from a cute bit with Ong's tiny little car, he's just a device.

But he can be a device because he's linked into a complex society the ruling Brits do not have real access to.  Who is he?  Has he helped the lawyer before in this way?  Does he have motivations aside from money for doing it?  None of this is the point of the movie, and so none of these questions are answered.  He serves as the guide to a crucial confrontation in the Asian part of town, but again, solely as a device.  Fixers and liminal characters like Ong are interesting, and he could easily have been a major character, with the murder and trial just as background to his own activities.

I have not yet read the original story.  I'm curious to see what role he plays there.  If it is similarly minor, I can claim him, or a version of him, for myself.

The Crimes of Literature

Writers lie to you. You know this.  They lie to you, but you know it and take it into account, so you are not damaged, and can perceive reality clearly anyway.  Maybe this is actually true.

But is there really any reason why we have to tell so many lies?  When you think of it, it's odd, and a little pathetic. I think the lies fiction tells are actually cognitive errors--mistakes inherent to narrative that misinterpret the state of reality.

I'll deal with some of these in more detail later, but for now, I'll just list some of the things we tell you regularly that are completely untrue.

• Physicians, even physicians in premodern times, actually know what's wrong with you and cure you.  That is, unless they are malign and greedy quacks, in which case they don't understand anything and will probably kill you.
• Physicians are good, the healthcare system they work in, and which pays them, is bad and out to deny needed care to sick people.
• If you dream something, that dream means something.
• Prophesies say something about the future.  And if a character comes to fulfill a prophecy, that's actual an honor rather than something particularly horrible.
• Generals who win battles are also loved by their troops.  Good commanders are not narcissistic, brutal, or lazy.
• If the main character creates an artwork of great quality, that artwork will also be incredibly popular.
• Obsessives and cranks are interesting people.
• If you are a good person, people will love you.

Many of these stem from the fact that the writer knows the future of the characters and can't help but let this bleed through.  As the inked note next to the underlined words in the secondhand book you bought always says:  foreshadowing.

I'm not really giving anything away here.  But I have many kennels full of desperately barking pet peeves, and I plan to unleash them on you, one by one.

The Weight of Literature

Some hikers think it’s stupid to bring a book on a long hike. You’re there to connect with nature, they say. Once you’ve set up camp, you should observe, feel, and relate with the wonders around you.

I can’t argue with that. But I like to read, and reading in the sun by the side of a mountain lake is, for me, as good as it gets.

These hikers also point out, with more justice, that the damn things are heavy. Aren’t we all ultralight hikers now?

So the whole thing comes down to an unfamiliar literary calculus: reading value per ounce. Good books that are too heavy are out, as are less than good books at any weight.

But sometimes a heavier book can save your life. When caught by a sleet storm up near the divide in Jasper and forced to hole up for twenty four hours, I read Neil Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and didn’t even notice the hours go by. At home, I’d had trouble with the book partway through (I had young kids at the time, and thus a reduced attention span—and the man could sure use a more assertive editor), but confined to a tent with nothing but sodden morrass outside, I followed the escape from New Guinea with total attention. A bit heavy and bulky, but that time it was the right choice.

On another Canadian Rockies hike I’d hauled Bed Gadd’s magnificent Handbook of the Canadian Rockies. Make no mistake, this is one of the best guide books to a wilderness area you’re going to find. But the thing is printed on coated paper and weighs over two pounds. That was just a symptom of greater overloading, and I was miserable that whole hike.

I read Stephen Jay Gould’s Panda’s Thumb in Dark Canyon, and Orwell’s essays in Bandelier.

I’m just back from the Sawtooths, where, after some internal debate (15 oz!) I brought Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo Rising, and didn’t regret it for a moment.

I presume the Kindle and its descendants will eliminate this entire critical metric—you can carry hundreds of books weighing only a few ounces. I won’t be able to resist for long.