*The quality on this photo is pretty poor because I snapped it on the fly with a cell phone camera, but the image was too interesting to pass up.
Photo blog 9
Some things my father said:
Stop shuffling. Pick up your feet. You’re ruining your shoes–walk from your heels to the balls of your feet.
Stop kicking the back of my seat. I’m trying to drive.
Shift! Left foot clutch, right foot gas–Brake!
If you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, don’t do it.
You need to learn tact. Do you know what tact means? Think before you speak.
Don’t say “um.” You need to eliminate “um” from your vocabulary.
Go ask your mother.
(Don’t tell your mother.)
***
You need to get a checking account. I don’t care what you think of banks–you need to live in the real world.
I have a system. I play the same numbers every week. Someday, I’d like the win the lottery.
“Oh, I wish I had a nickel, I wish I had a dime—I wish I had a pretty-little-girl to love me all the time! Get along home, Cindy, Cindy. Get along home, Cindy, Cindy. Get along home, Cindy, Cindy. I’m gonna marry you some day.”
(Don’t tell your mother.)
***
Why do you insist on wearing your hat backwards? They make the bill for a reason–what are you, protecting your neck? I thought that’s why you were growing your hair long.
You need to learn to respect other people’s property.
Close your mouth.
I think we can fix it with duct tape.
Sometimes you’re better off with your mouth shut.
Thanks for the lessons, Dad! I didn’t know what I was doing, but I didn’t do it. Here’s the duct tape.
I’ll go ask Mom.
Happy Father’s Day!
Still MORE writing and music
With all the posts I’ve been writing lately about the influence of music on writing, I simply have to share this recent discovery: It’s a song-sharing site called Stereomood, but the idea is not simply to share songs. (The site is a streaming site, not a download site, so I’m sharing this because it acts like a radio station and I’m not as worried about copyright violations.) The idea behind Stereomood is that users organize playlists according to mood tags, which, let’s be honest, we’ve all been doing since the days of the blank cassette. You remember the mix tape? This whole site is a mix tape.
I’m posting this here because it reminds me of my high school friend Keith, who might have been the guy who first showed me the connection between writing and music. Maybe I made the connection myself earlier (I remember writing a passion-driven poem to the powerful cello and viola pieces from Tout les Matins du Monde, but I don’t remember when I first saw that film), or maybe I made the connection later and then remembered that Keith had beat me to it–I don’t recall the exact moment I started this association. But I do remember hanging out with him and our friend Anthony in Keith’s basement on late weekend nights, the glow of Keith’s computer monitor haunting the dark, all of us scribbling in notebooks or taking turns typing on Keith’s computer while we listened to the homemade cassette compilation Keith had labeled “Slow, Morbid Writing Songs.” It was full of dark, angsty, overblown tracks like Pink Floyd’s “The Final Cut” or Ozzy’s duet with Lita Ford or the moodier Pearl Jam tracks from Ten. And we were dark, angsty teens prone to overblowing everything, so we loved it.
Stereomood operates on the same principle. Not everything is “slow and morbid,” but the listeners associate songs with emotional moods or emotionally charged/nostalgia-driven activities, with categories like “dreamy,” “chillout,” and “road trip.” And, lo and behold, there is a whole playlist devoted entirely to writing. It’s quite a mixed bag, this particular playlist, starting with the instrumental “No Cars Go (Arcade Fire Cover)” by Maxine Cyrin and including the simple but sweeping piano movement “The Heart Asks Pleasure First” from the soundtrack to The Piano, but breaking those up with songs like the Bobby McFerrin/Jason Mraz/Israel Kamakawiwo’ole mashup “Don’t Worry, I’m Yours” and Bob Marley’s beautiful “Redemption Song” as well as the unexpected “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” by Black Kids and a handful of tracks by The Papercuts and Grand Archives.
The “writing” tag is actually one of the slimmer categories (it contains only 27 songs; other categories, like “candlelit dinner” or “asleep on my feet,” contains hundreds of tracks), but maybe with your help, we can add to the list and beef that playlist up. If fact, this might be a very cool opportunity for us all to share our musical writing inspirations with each other. I’m thinking of adding Mono and God Bless You! Black Emperor, for sure (there’s already a long and fascinating track by post-rock band The End of the Ocean, but Mono and GBYBE are even better).
Also, while I have everyone’s attention, let me wish all the dads out there–especially my own–a happy Father’s Day!
A Writer’s Notebook: Personal ads
Today’s exercise is in response to a 19th-century personal ad (you can read the ad and the blog entry about it here). For the exercise, see below.
Matrimonial. – A young lady of prepossessing appearance, fascinating manners and romantic sentiments desires to open a correspondence with a gentleman with a view to matrimony. He must be young, handsome, amiable, and a [?] Union man. Any person possessing the abovementioned qualifications will please address L.R. Vincent, Herald office.
Her name was Martha, like George Washington’s wife, and she was in love with her writing desk. Since she was a child of ten–so, nearly half her life–she’d dreamt of sitting in a small parlor, with the drapes open over a narrow bay window and the afternoon sun streaming through at a slant, just enough light to see by but not so much it would cause her headaches, and there she would while away her afternoons writing correspondence. Sometimes she imagined herself writing to her brothers, both of whom had returned from the war heroes and had since gone into politics (though in reality one had died and the other the family had not heard from in more than a year). Other times she imagined herself writing letters to the editor of the local newspaper decrying some moral indecency or supporting some politician–for she dearly loved politics and longed to discuss it more openly. But it was only in this last year that she’d begun to dream of writing to a beau, long wistful letters of such sincerity and poeticism that she herself would cry at rereading them. She thought sometimes to practice these letters, to create drafts or at least keep notes in a diary of the things she might write to a man, but she worried doing so would sap all the spontaneity and romance from the words. Better, she decided, to save it for the moment. Which meant she needed to create the moment in which to write such missives, and to that end, she set about seeking male companionship. It was not easy, in her small city with all the eligible men gone to war, but she was determined, and as she did not often venture beyond her own shaded neighborhood, she decided the simplest, most intelligent solution would be to advertise. Also, she had need of an intelligent man, one who would appreciate her love of writing, and cared little for his appearance so long as he was mannered and well-groomed. A husband needed to be attractive to be the object of romance, of course, but in truth she wanted a Cyrano more than an Adonis. So her first measure of a potential husband would have to be in his words, and it seemed only fair that his first measure of her would be the same. So on this day, she sat at her writing desk–not in a parlor, for she was not married yet and so had no parlor to sit in; rather, she sat in her small bedroom upstairs, where the window was shaded by a beautiful elm but the sunlight was filtered and poor–and began an short advertisement to the local newspaper.
This exercise is a kind of reversal of an interesting exercise I found at Lori Ann Bloomfield’s blog, First Line. In Bloomfield’s exercise, she offers us a few short character sketches and then invites us to write personal ads for those characters. I wanted to tackle that exercise, but I was having a hard time getting my head into it, and I realized after a while that I was actually avoiding the writing–and an exercise is supposed to generate writing, not stop it. I was failing the exercise. But I also realized that the reason was I was much more interested in the sketches Bloomfield had provided, which is when I decided to turn the thing around: I went looking for personal ads with interesting characters I could then write about.
There are a lot of really freaky personal ads out there. I don’t like to judge people, but seriously, some of the ads I read? Scary stuff. (Here’s an idea for a character: A psychiatrist who operates like an ambulance-chasing sleazy lawyer; the shrink prowls the personal ads to find new clients.)
I didn’t have to look long before I decided I couldn’t write about the people who wrote those ads. Well, I could–sometimes I do–but I couldn’t post them here in the blog. I respect you too much to subject you to that. And then I stumbled across a fascinating blog called Advertising for Love: A collection of funny, strange, poignant and just plain bizarre personal ads from the nineteenth century.
Ah, the 19th century. Such a simpler time. No promiscuity; no mail-order spouses; no strange, lonely people calling desperately into the dark, just praying for something that might resemble love.
How we do like to romanticize the past.
The truth is, the ads on this site are just as bizarre (and as interesting) as the ads today, but they’re also (generally) better written, with a stronger command of the English language. Or at least they’re politer.
So, try Bloomfield’s exercise and write some personal ads for your characters. Or turn it around and write some characters from some personal ads. Or both. But in all cases, have fun with it!
BONUS: I’ve written before about how you can use classified ads and newspaper clippings as part of your research for fiction, but I hadn’t considered how important personal ads can be for that process, especially when trying to flesh out personalities in historical fiction. Definitely a resource to add to your list!
Photo blog 8
Patrons of writing and teaching: My grandfather, Ted Snoek
Ordinarily, I reserve the “patrons” entries for divine and/or fictional influences on my writing and teaching. But today I want to write about a real, living person, because today is my grandfather’s 90th birthday.
My grandfather, Ted Snoek, has had a profound influence on my professional life. His father died fairly young, when my grandfather was only a teenager, so my grandfather had to leave high school early and head to sea to help support the family. The sea became his career, as it was for his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and he never managed to return to school. But Ted Snoek made the sea his education, and he is a vastly intelligent man.
People like to talk about “the school of life,” but few of us really know what that phrase means. Some people (academics, mostly, and yes, I’m an academic) tend to use the phrase dismissively. But I know what value experience can offer a person — how much education an intelligent person can receive through simply reading and paying attention and thinking critically. Our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, was largely self-taught until he became a lawyer, and my grandfather is similarly self-educated. In fact, I’ve often likened my grandfather to Lincoln — they share a similar compassion, a similar deep spirituality, a similar wisdom and solid judgment–and, of course, Ted Snoek is the same height as Lincoln was, a fact I dwelled on a lot as a kid gazing upward at my towering, larger-than-life, sea-captain grandfather.
But Ted Snoek also values formal education tremendously, and he has long been one of my strongest supporters in my own education. In fact, it was my paternal grandparents who urged me to attend Schreiner College (now University) after high school — they were the ones who took me for my first campus visit. (My grandfather still maintains ties with Schreiner’s current president, who attended church with my grandfather back in southeast Texas.)
In fact, my grandparents are both so passionate about education that when they lived in southeast Texas, they frequently enrolled in continuing ed courses at the local college. I used to think I was strange coming home from college with tidbits from history class, writing exercises I wanted my family to participate in, or group meditation sessions with my mother and sister based on techniques I’d learned in my Taoism course. But then my grandparents turned up and started massaging our feet, and when we asked why, they said it was homework — they were taking a reflexology class.
And then there are the stories.
I am convinced that my father and I are both natural storytellers because my grandfather is a natural storyteller. All during my trip to the Netherlands (from which the Snoek family came to the US 115 years ago), I posted Writer’s Notebook entries that were, in fact, my grandfather’s written account of his father’s life. Ted Snoek’s own stories from the sea are no less exciting, and reading or hearing them aloud, I know this is where my desire to tell stories comes from. (The family tendency toward embellishment is probably the root cause of my interest in fiction.)
So here’s to Capt. Ted B. Snoek, my grandfather. Happy 90th, Grandpa!
Don’t shush! Make some noise in the library!
I know this has been making the rounds, but after my font-nerd post back in March and my research post on marrying a librarian, I’d feel remiss if I didn’t post this outstanding video of librarians doing a cover of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Sure, the production values aren’t quite as professional-looking as the font-nerd video, but these are real librarians Gaga-ing it up in the library! (Keep an eye out in the video for the famous Nancy Pearl, model for the infamous Librarian Action Figure!).
Plus, in what is simply pure genius, the rewritten lyrics actually convey some basic concepts of bibliographic instruction! (For those non-academics out there, “bibliographic instruction” is what librarians are doing when they teach you how to use the library. FYI: My librarian wife’s favorite line in the whole song is “Don’t forget the databases!”)
Fun, and educational? Win!
A Writer’s Notebook: Likes and Dislikes
Still working on the character of Ford. This week, his likes and dislikes, which I’ll explain below.
Ford likes the sound of cicadas in the summertime, the whirring from afternoon till dusk. He likes the heat, and the cicadas’ song always brings it.
Ford likes old pick-ups, the big boxy kind from the `50s, the `70s, the kind with engine frames big enough you can climb inside, sit on a fender wall while you dismantle the head.
Ford likes the department stores that set up floor displays of furniture, the huge hardware stores with a dozen model kitchens and sample bathrooms. He likes to go to the store in the early afternoon in the middle of a work week, when the aisles are almost empty; he’ll stand in the models and imagine who might live there, what they’d be doing in the shower, in the bed, never knowing that Ford was overseeing everything.
Ford likes details. He’ll study and study a thing, get in close to it, pull out magnifying glasses, peer and poke. He’ll disassemble anything, and he can usually put it together again. The tiny screwdrivers that come in those sets the computer nerds use are fragile and slippery in his thick, strong hands, but he handles them carefully and uses them a lot, because the smaller the screws needed to hold a thing together, the more pleasure he takes in extracting them.
Ford likes to watch nature fight itself. He watches predator films on the wildlife channels, goes to dog fights or cock fights when he can find them. When he was a kid, he liked to capture scorpions and wasps and put them in glass jars together. It took a little encouraging to get them to fight, but he always enjoyed the battle.
Ford hates those window stickers people put in the rear windows of their pick-ups, the ones that show the cartoon Calvin pissing on the Ford emblem. He doesn’t much care about the debate between Ford and Chevy–he drives a Dodge–but he’ll throw a rock through any window that has that disrespectful sticker on it.
Ford doesn’t like cops. He doesn’t mind knowing they’re around and understands why society needs them, because someone has to keep the teenagers and degenerates in line, but no cop has any business messing in Ford’s life. As long as people let him do as he pleases, people would get along a lot more peacefully.
Ford can’t stand foods that have silly nicknames. Mac and cheese. PB&J. Peas and carrots. That last one’s not a nickname, but when people use it as a curse word it just pisses him off.
The same thing goes for crayons–he hates the big boxes. He likes the real colors, the simple colors: Gray. Brown. Green. Once you get past the basic eight, the names just get stupid. Cornflower. Salmon. Boysenberry. It’s idiotic.
Ford dislikes deer blinds. He’ll sit around of an afternoon and knock back a six pack same as any man, but sitting in a glorified treehouse and calling that hunting is just plain fraud. A real hunter stalks, tracks, moves in on his prey. A real hunter won’t wait for anything to just come to him–a real hunter knows how to catch what he’s after with his own two hands.
After writing the “character interview” with Ford last week, I got so interested in the story developing out of that imagined conversation that I actually started working on the story. (See? Who says writing exercises are a waste of time?) But getting a handle on the character of Ford has always been difficult for me, given his dark and complicated nature, which is one reason this story has sat on the proverbial shelf for so long. This week, I was thinking about character traits and defining details, and I remembered the opening sequence in the film Amelie, one of my favorite movies of all time. In the first several minutes of the film, an omniscient narrator gives us a rapid-fire history of Amelie and her parents, fleshing out pertinent attributes through quirky details. One of the more delightful techniques the film uses is to describe the things each character likes and dislikes (“I like to look for things no one else catches,” Amelie herself tells the camera. “I hate the way drivers never look at the road in old American movies.”), and I decided to make a similar list for Ford.
Theoretically, you could do this through freewriting, just slamming out a rapid-fire list of whatever pops into your head, and in certain situations that might be the best approach. But accessing your subconscious that way might lead you to write down things you like or dislike, rather than details about your character. And in this case, Ford is definitely NOT me, so I needed to more carefully select things that would speak to his character as well as to the story I want to tell–namely, of a man who was convicted of statutory rape but claims he is misunderstood, and about whom it’s hard to tell which he might be, the victim of social misjudgment or a barely-restrained sociopath.
I don’t know if any of these details will hold up or make it into the story, but they’re what I’m going with for now, and they will definitely help me move forward with the story.
Photo blog 7
Note: I don’t know what atmospheric conditions created this “spotlight” effect during the sunset, but if anyone could explain it to me, I’d love to know. I find it fascinating.
Music & Literature Part I: Experimentation
a guest blog by Ryan Werner
A while back, I wrote a post about how music influences my writing, which led to not one but two Writer’s Notebook exercises about writing from music. But I said in that initial post that my relationship with music is purely as a listener–I don’t have any experience with playing or composing music. And then I referenced Ryan Werner, who has plenty of experience with both and is also a heck of a talented writer.
So I contacted Ryan and asked for his thoughts, and they were so extensive and so interesting that I decided to just turn over my blog to him and let him write a series of guest posts on music and literature, from the perspective of a musician and a writer.
This is the first of those posts.
Perhaps it’s partially because I’m still relatively new to the local music scene—a pithy twenty-five years old and not officially a local, meaning I not only missed out on the all-ages shows that dominated the youth of a lot of my contemporary’s early teens but also that I didn’t have a chance to start going to shows until I was twenty—but I’ve only recently noticed, in the past few years, a surge in the number of noise bands being formed.
Actually, noise bands usually aren’t bands at all, but, rather, some dude (I’m yet to see a female noise musician) with a keyboard or guitar altering a continuous loop of tones or (even worse) feedback for a half hour to 45 minutes. I’m not sure whether performing this kind of music is for catharsis or experimentation or both. I’m still trying to understand it. As far as I can tell, it’s like performance art without the performance—or the art.
I went to a few noise shows (the first one purposely, the rest by accident) and noticed that I could stay home and make heavy breathing noises into a deskfan and produce the same result. This struck me as neither catharsis nor experimentation, neither an emotional release nor a deviation from the norm.
If there is supposed to be catharsis, there must be tension. I understand the release: the aural pillaging. The tension is mostly internal, though, and it often seems to go undefined for the audience, upon who there is an opposite effect. In theory, a noise performance works in a beautiful way: the internal tension of the artist is released as a punishing swirl of noise, the noise becomes a form of tension for the audience, and the silence following the noise because the audience’s release and the noise artist’s return to building internal tension.
In actuality, what happens is that some angry kid gets up there and tries to experiment with sound as a way to feel all right. Again, that’s fine in theory. The youth and fervor with which these noise musicians (usually guys my age or younger) attack with the music is interesting, but those same two things that propel them are the same things that end up making me challenge the purity, depth, and development of what they’re doing. How can someone deviate from norms that he knows nothing about? To be an alternative to something that you don’t know you’re being an alternative to makes your experimentation hollow.
I’m not saying experimentation can’t work. To use experimentation correctly, I believe that it should be done both with the goal of using it to form context and with the door closed, as an exercise. Exercises themselves are experiments, and can be endlessly helpful in progressing a work along. But if you can tell that something came from an exercise when it’s done, you there’s a problem: too much exercise, not enough performance.
Every once in awhile, I see someone using noise in the perfect way: as an effect, a part of the overall idea instead of the entire idea. There’s a difference between an album like Medulla by Bjork and an album like Zero Tolerance for Silence by Pat Metheny. Every sound on Medulla is made by the human voice. Bjork walked into the studio to prove a point: that the human voice is beautiful enough to carry an entire album all by itself. While atypical and certainly kitsch, the album wouldn’t have worked with any other instrumentation or tweak in style. If it wasn’t experimental, it wouldn’t have succeeded.
Zero Tolerance for Silence, on the other hand, is a bunch of noise (literally: guitar feedback and blues-wank solos, no other instruments than guitar on the record). It’s still talked about 15 years later as a milestone in experimentation. Pat Metheny himself says, “That record speaks for itself in its own musical terms. To me, it is a 2-D view of a world in which I am usually functioning in a more 3-D way. It is entirely flat music, and that was exactly what it was intended to be.” To me, that’s an exercise. That’s also walking into a recording studio to prove a point, but it gets caught up in the experiment instead of the end result. If it wasn’t experimental, it wouldn’t have existed.
When the experimentation is scraped away, there should be a failing work underneath it instead of nothing at all.
Maybe it’s just an issue of semantics. People have projects these days. Where did all the bands go? Don’t people have bands anymore, or just projects? Similarly, in the literary world, people have pieces, not stories. I know I use them interchangeably, but the emergence of “the piece” scares me (I know I sound like an old curmudgeon. Really, I’m twenty-five, I swear). House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski seems to only function as a piece. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying does, too. The experimentation of those two books is what gives them their appeal (the layers of how to read the book, the multiple voices, the daunting concept in and of itself), and the depth is what gives them longevity. With “unsuccessful” pieces, the experimentation is both the appeal and the longevity, which equates to something that isn’t necessarily non-literature, but just cheap.
So, don’t expect me to buy your six-album box-set of you running a belt-sander against a fifty-five gallon drum of nails. Also, don’t expect me to buy your book of fiction based on evil recipes, anything that reads like a choose your own adventure for the MFA crowd, your 1,000 page novel of stream of conscious rambling, or anything else that is experimentation without a grasp of why it’s experimentation, internal tension and external release, and/or something I can do at home in my spare time.
You can check out some of Ryan Werner’s literary experiments at his blog, Our Band Could Be Your Lit; to find out more about one of his several bands, look for Bull Dyke Rodeo on MySpace and Facebook.
Samuel Snoek-Brown 