let’s hear it for showmanship!

There’s much to be said for the  same day, standing-room cheap ticket. You line up 30 min beforehand and barely have time to Google the show. Expectations are low or nonexistent, so you’re that much more likely to be totally bowled over.

At the BBC Proms a couple of weeks ago, 10:30pm at Royal Albert Hall, I stood spellbound as the Spaghetti Western Orchestra interpreted the music of Italian movie-composer Enrico Morricone.*

[*whose name I keep confusing with "Moriarty" thanks to the awesome new BBC Sherlock I've been watching.]

This is music designed for storytelling, written to advance narrative and augment mood. And boy, do these talented musicians know how to tell a story!

Clowning fun is combined with airtight choreography and staging. A saloon comes instantly to life with nothing but microphone mumblings and the clinking of bottles.  A brushfire ignites when the microphone is pressed into a box of Cornflakes.  One piece ends in a melodic chorus of gunfighters’ death-rattles .  Thus the SWO is nostalgic–even melancholy at moments–but never sentimental.

The show (and the films that inspire it) is a great reminder that the West was always a myth–a product of imaginative fantasy and fun.

Look it up on BBC4 (it airs tonight)!

if you graph it, they will come

At the Dirt Exhibit in London I got to see John Snow’s “ghost map” graphing cholera cases during the 1854 outbreak:

This map helped prove that cholera spread not through “miasma” in the air but tainted water (the deaths marked on the map cluster around the Broad Street pump). It’s commonly credited with contributing to the birth of epidemiology.

Here’s another map, this time pertaining not to disease but to literature:

This version was drawn by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer via Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

The hero’s journey (Campbell calls it the “monomyth”) may not have saved as many lives as Snow’s map. But it arguably led to the birth of literary criticism.

woman as landscape

I’m curious about the whole idea of comparing a woman’s body to a physical landscape. Is it sexy only because literary history has taught us it’s sexy? Or is there something inherently erotic/romantic about the metaphor?

Top-of-my-head examples: John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland” (although is she a theme park or a nature preserve in the song? hard to say) and the Great Lakes Swimmers’ “Your Rocky Spine” (Listen to it! It’s so bee-ootiful.):

It’s not a new metaphor. Way back in 1600, John Donne’s Elegy 20, “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” trumpets her naked bod as the explorer’s prize:

O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!

Sex as discovery and claim-staking is a pretty sexy idea, old as it may be.

Here’s what I want to know:

1. Can the metaphor stick for the male body, too? Do we have any examples of women describing their male lovers as uncharted landscapes?

2. Is it sexist? I mean, if the woman is virgin territory, then the man is the conquering hero, right? In grad school I remember learning how narrative (whether drama or literature or film) automatically and necessarily posits the feminine as the passive territory to be moved through by (male) protagonists. One of the feminist theorists we read on this was Teresa de Lauretis.

3. What’s so sexy about woman as landscape? My current theory is that it’s based on exaggeration: the body writ large, so that it becomes more powerful and profound than it could ever be in real life.

Any thoughts? Let us know in a comment…

field trip: museum of dirt

At the Wellcome Collection’s fabulous exhibition on Dirt in London, I recently discovered the source of my lifelong, low-grade housewifely guilt. The show’s first room was dedicated to the 17th century Dutch notion that cleanliness was integral to godliness.

The upside of my ancestors’ belief that cleaning the house was akin to cleaning the soul? In 1683 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek inspected his own tooth-scrapings under a microscope and discovered “animalculae,” aka bacteria.

In Purity and Danger Mary Douglas argues that “There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder.”  This is, most definitely, not a concept I grew up with. But I’m learning, I’m learning.

Ask Dr. Freud: Oedipus and vampires

Dear Dr. Freud,

I read recently that your theory of the Oedipus Complex can account for the popularity of vampire stories in contemporary literature and film. Can you explain the connection?

Sincerely,

Vampfan

 

 

Dear Vampfan,

As you know, the myth of Oedipus, like so many of the stories through which a civilization defines itself, launches with the murder of the father. Vampires, because they are both immortal and virile, thwart this basic mythical premise right from the start. Thus the figure of the vampire erects a powerful counter-myth to our notions of progress, inheritance and enlightenment.

Take Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example.  Dracula is said to be the most frequently adapted book of all time (films, radio dramas, operas, graphic novels, breakfast cereals–you name it).  In this ultimate nightmare of the castrating father, the Count’s sin is not just that he refuses to pass away and make room for the next generation; it’s also that he is actively buying up downtown London real estate and seducing its young women.  So a diverse group of young men must put aside their own competitive quarrels and band together to rout Dracula.  Only when this fantastical parricide is complete can they carry on with their own procreative activities.

How this applies to the current generation of conscientious-yet-sexy young vamps is a different question altogether. Our fear of aging is stronger today than ever before, thanks to multibillion-dollar cosmetic, fitness and diet industries. Could be when it comes to today’s vampires we’re not nervous, we’re jealous.

Cordially yours,

Sigmund.

summer camp craftiness

As an immigrant kid I missed out on the venerable Canadian tradition of summer camp, so I am now living vicariously through my kids (alright it’s not the first time; hello, Wii Dance!!). The night before they left for camp I soothed my maternal heartache by making them friendship bracelets in their favorite colors.

I won’t bore you with step-by-step instructions, since the YouTube tutorials are the only way to go.

So maybe the older kid took his off the first time he went swimming, and it got lost. And maybe the younger one got his in the mail and neglected to ask his counselor to tie it on his wrist.

I certainly enjoyed wearing mine while they were gone.

wordiness and the Brits

Check out the notice posted in the elevator of my flat in London!

If a student of mine wrote like this in an essay, s/he would lose marks for wordiness. I wonder now if this just a North American rule?

I mean, listen to all these Americans go on about cultivating a lean, mean prose style:

“Eschew surplusage.” -Mark Twain

“Eliminate every superfluous word.” -Ernest Hemingway

“So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.” -Dr. Seuss.

You get the idea. I first learned the evils of wordiness from Strunk and White, the (American) Old Boys who wrote The Elements of Style. In my earliest essay-writing days I had several professors who enforced this little book’s pithy advice, reminding us to “omit needless words, not to make all the sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

But then, Strunk and White have come under fire for breaking their own grammar rules, and even setting rules that make no grammatical sense.

Hereafter we shall proceed calmly to express ourselves employing a style which is reflective of the experience to which we were exposed regarding the prolixity endemic to Londoners.

QOD: dog days of August

“Nature, as we know her, is no saint.  The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by any favor.  She comes eating and drinking and sinning.  Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law;  do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weight their food, nor punctually keep the commandments.  If we will be strong with her strength we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations.  We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

where have you been?

I’ve been to London, to visit the Queen!

Well, the British Library, anyway (so far). How tickled was I to find an exhibit on Science Fiction there to distract me from my research! “Out Of This World” includes a video loop of Margaret Atwood discussing eco-catastrophe in Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood, but she’s not the only Canadian: Candas Jane Dorsey’s Machine Sex is part of the display too.

from the exhibit webpage, April 1928 cover for Amazing Stories (note lightning-bolt lashes!)

It’s an excellent exhibit, cleverly organized not by history or region but theme: aliens, time travel, futurity, disaster/survivalism, alternate history (a disturbing number of books imagine if Hitler had won!), cyberpunk.

I spent my time not at the draw-your-own-alien station (where a screen projected yours and others’ creations onto the wall), or on the interactive sci-fi predictions true-or-false quiz, but standing in front of draft manuscript pages by two of my faves, J. G. Ballard and Angela Carter. Ballard hand-corrected the you-know-what out of his typed ms, whereas Carter’s handwritten first draft could have been a transcribed copy of the published novel. Only little asterisks here and there, and an occasional margin note, suggested anything other than a perfectly linear thought-into-print process.

Back at my flat, up to my eyeteeth in my own revisions, I prefer to keep Ballard’s page in mind for inspiration, thankyouverymuch. Mind you, while I’m imagining dead authors’ lives, I imagine Ballard probably handed the mussed-up pages to his secretary or his girlfriend for typing, while Carter probably had to type up every flawless page for herself. And I imagine both of them fantasized about word processors at some point or another.

How’s that for futurism?

on voice

At ChiZine Publications’ Chiaroscuro Reading Series last night I encountered something rare and wonderful: a writer who voices her own work when she reads. Lesley Livingston may write her fantasy/romance novels specifically for young adults, but thanks to her voicing, her reading managed to win over the event’s older, primarily sci-fi/horror-fan crowd.

What does it mean to voice your reading? Most obviously, it’s about dialogue: choosing a different voice for each character who speaks, and maintaining this difference throughout. You don’t need to be a method actor to do this; even the slightest inflection or change in pitch does the trick. Lesley can do a decent British accent, but I know from other readings that a poor one, or a wholly invented one, will aid listeners’ suspension of disbelief just as well.

But voicing works in subtler ways, too. Lesley’s focalizer in Once Every Never is a disaffected teenage girl named Clare, and the story emerges from a blend between Clare’s observations and a slightly more “literary” and mature governing perspective. This means that Lesley’s narrative voice is different than her “real” voice, and you can hear this difference when she reads. To the words on the page she adds whatever’s called for in the scene she’s conjuring: expressive pauses, flabbergasted stuttering, ironic brow-lifting, upspeak, hand gestures and the occasional embarrassed giggle.

Bringing the actor’s skills to bear on a reading might sound like too tall an order to some writers. Some of us are introverts and quail before a crowd. But many more of us simply want to detach ourselves from our work when we present it, in case it’s not well received. Or we’re worried about sounding too smitten with our own words; we want the writing to speak for itself. This don’t-shoot-the-messenger impulse results in a reading voice that aims for neutral and dispassionate but very often comes off as mechanical and mumbly. Listeners have to concentrate intensely to follow and often end up with their eyes closed. It’s every public speaker’s worst nightmare to look out at a snoozing audience, but the only safeguard against it is to animate your voice!

It comes down to commitment. Can you take your own work seriously enough to risk bringing it to life? Can you throw yourself into it? Lesley Livingston sure can, and the rising success of her career proves that the effort is worth it!