Category: Literature

And with Strange Aeons Even Death May Die

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“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

 

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

 

After yesterday’s post I received several communications from readers outraged at the manner in which such a venerable and iconic entity as the First Selectman could be allowed to leave this continuum.  Many simply refused to believe the facts such as they are and hang onto hope that Cthulhu lives.  As the quotes above attest there is a tradition that Cthulhu can remain inert for literally billions of years and still reanimate and wreak a terrible vengeance on mankind when the stars align just right (or just wrong).

Well, I will not speculate at this point on the Great Old One’s chances of resuscitation.  As Hamlet very cleverly noted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  And if we add to heaven and earth the depths of hell, then we begin to list the span of infinities where knowledge of the First Selectman can be hiding.  And since I already miss the old villain a little bit, I’ll keep an open mind as to his chances of reintegration.  Let’s leave it there for now.

I have finally completed the herculean task to which I was yoked.  My spirit, such as it is, has rebounded measurably and I look around me to see the state of life in the here and now.  I note the same stale prattle about polls and bickering with the names Trump, Harris, Vance and Walz attached.  Frankly all of this is too tedious to even consider.  Let all of that stew for a while.

The summer wanes and school children are already frozen with existential dread at the approach of Labor Day.  But, this time of year is not without its charms.  I was forced to rise hideously early Tuesday morning and so I was out and about before 4:00 am when I happened to look up at the sky and was struck by the brightness of the stars and planets and their inspiring beauty.  If I had not been on an unavoidable mission, I might have stood there for a quarter hour and marveled at this arresting vision.  At that moment I was reminded of this aspect of reality and how these incomprehensible phenomena we call stars can be both the source of our lives and these beautiful beacons that light up the night sky that we so rarely bother to view.  So out of the most tedious and soul-crushing activities it is possible to experience a moment of primal joy and wonder.

But now I’ll spend a day or two catching up with my various duties.  Bear with me as I take up again the reins of my daily routine and restore order to my life.  I must write and trim some posts and schedule them and I must read up on any “news” I might have missed and try to draw inspiration from my surroundings and the important things that need to be said and done.

So good morning!

What Makes a Good Story?

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An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.  A famous play is the story of an overly proud king disowning his only loving child for not flattering him and then paying the price for it.  A three-thousand-year-old poem tells the story of a proud warrior being dishonored by a foolish king and the havoc that ensues in a famous war that includes gods and goddesses acting decidedly human.  A boy saves a princess with the help of a space pirate and a mystical monk long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Two almost god-like races, one devoted to peace and truth and the other consumed by war and evil fight a war of extermination in the Milky Way galaxy over the course of billions of years.  A movie tells the story of seven samurai or seven cowboys agreeing to save a town from bandits with glory as the only reward.  A hen-pecked New Jersey grocery store owner sells everything he owns and travels 3,000 miles to California to buy an orange ranch that doesn’t have any oranges on it.  A man drags his wife and young son two thousand miles to an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains where they will all be the playthings of ghosts who want to add them to the spectral residents.

What do all of these stories have in common?  Well, almost nothing.  Each of them is a fairly popular work of fiction.  But otherwise, they’re all over the map in terms of plot, characters, genre and the societies they represent.  But what makes them successful stories is their ability to draw the reader (or viewer) into their worlds and spark human empathy.  It’s as simple as that.

We recognize Frodo’s humanity and cheer him on as he pits his tiny strength against titanic forces of evil.  We shake our heads at the pig-headed antics of Achilles and Agamemnon but we nod our heads at the recognition that war will take good men like Hector and make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.  We thrill to the heroics of a small band of warriors pitting their strength and skill against a small army of bandits, knowing full well that most of them will die in the battle.  We laugh at and at the same time see ourselves in a man constantly belittled and frustrated by everyone around him including his overbearing wife and annoying children who then stubbornly heads down the road to ruin only to be saved by fortune and his own indestructible sense that eventually it will have to be his turn.

So, what is the most important aspect?  Plot or character?  I used to think plot.  After all, we all like the quest and the action scenes and all the other hooks that draw us into the story.  But as I get older, I realize that if the characters are mere ciphers, then the hold thing devolves into a video game.  And it can be fun and exciting but on reflection it feels sort of meaningless.  Does it really matter how many monsters he fights if you don’t believe the hero is real?

So that’s the trick for the author.  Somehow you have to invest your heroes and villains with enough humanity to make your reader (or viewer) care.  Breathing life into a stream of words takes a bit of doing.  Usually, you have to take something from your own experience to make it seem real.  But when it’s done right it’s the rewarding part of writing.  Self-satisfaction.

Talk the Talk

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Regular readers of this site know I tend to make fun of H P Lovecraft’s prose style.  In his better written stories, it has a quasi-nineteenth century sound to it.  But in some of his less ably written material it instead just sounds kind of overblown.  But recently I’ve been listening to a YouTube channel called Horror Babble by some guy called Ian Gordon who sounds a little like the actor who played Jay Peterman on Seinfeld.  He provides an accent that, I guess, is supposed to sound like something between 1920’s Oxbridge English and possibly early twentieth century Boston Brahmin.

After listening to a few of these recordings I’ve realized that this presentation makes these stories incalculably more entertaining.  Let me qualify this statement.  It doesn’t make the stories better horror stories.  But the presentation is just more fun.  I think the accent makes the ridiculousness of the stories seem intentional.  It’s camp.

And maybe it works because that’s more or less the “voice” that Lovecraft was hearing in his own head.  It’s always seemed to me that Lovecraft’s work was sort of an homage to Edgar Allan Poe.  And because Lovecraft lived far removed from the era when Poe’s prose was contemporary and because Poe was a consummately better writer Lovecraft’s language always seems stilted.   But with a spoken word interpreter somewhat bridging the gap with his theatrical reading it somehow works pretty well.

Now most of you probably already listen to audio-books.  The only ones I’ve ever listened to were Larry Correia’s Adventures of Tom Stranger with Adam Baldwin providing the voice talent.  And come to think of it the specific voice really does make a big difference in the enjoyment of that story too.

Well, anyway, this little epiphany has got me thinking about the voice that you hear when you write something.  I mean, unless you’re writing a character that’s more or less you, how do you hear that character or characters speaking.  What do they sound like?  Is it a regional accent?  And that’s kind of a big deal.  If all my characters sound exactly like me that might make it hard for my readers to see these characters as real people.  Going back and reading some of my dialog I would say that there are definitely differences in speech for the different characters.  And this is most noticeable for characters that differ in sex, age and generation.  So, I’m not worried that I have to reinvent all of my dialog.

But it does occur to me that maybe I’d like to add some characters that have very flamboyant speech patterns just to give the story some extra zing.  After all, even Shakespeare added dialect characters to make some of the scenes comical or memorable.  His dialect characters were usually Irish or Welsh or Scottish.  I guess I could throw in a Southie from Boston or a South Asian character for good measure.  But if I really want to get exotic, I’ll throw in a Millennial Social Justice Warrior.  Now that’s a foreign language that’ll take some practice.

Guest Contributor – Xavier – 23MAR2024 – Genre vs Literature

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This post raises two important and related questions. One is the question of genre fiction versus fiction/literature or entertainment versus literature. The other, how technology impacts this balance.

On the first point I think the best guide for the use of imagination in narrative fiction or really any literature is could it be real. That is, literature always fabricates events, but only events that could be real, at least to the viewer. This may seem overly restrictive, but even if we look at even the most fantastic events in literature, they are literature precisely because they are convincing. The narrative is not just believable, but super believable, as the clumsy moniker of surrealism suggests. The reader has to have a reason to suspend disbelief and that reason has to be both compelling and convincing.

This is why Macbeth can include incanting witches and Hamlet a ghost. Same for Dickens, Joyce, etc. We don’t mind Old Hamlet showing up every night to drive the action. His presence is utterly real to mind of any son that lost a father to murder. That reality may be the reality of a dream or some subconscious memory acting on a son’s emotions, but it plays as real almost universally.

The second question relating to our kids watching stories inside game applications like Minecraft and its relation to literature and media has a very direct precedent in movies. As soon as movies got past the novelty stage when they were sequestered in menageries they looked to literature to augment the spectacle. I can be argued that screenplays almost never satisfactorily translate literature, not even drama where the analogy seems direct.

I believe literature doesn’t translate well because movies, like radio, video and now video games, are essentially entertainment media mixed with mass communication. It is not novel to say that the commercial dimension of these media plays a much greater role than they do in traditional art forms, which were mostly centered around patrons.

Some radio dramas, such as those produced by there Mercury Players, seem to approach the experience of attending a play. So maybe these mass media/entertainment forms can become like literature if they survive long enough to establish the required conventions to seem real. But movies and radio were quickly supplanted by TV and now video games. So perhaps the balance for literature requires a limit of commerce and reliance on technology, as these certainly are not timeless.

Most traditional “critics” would say that the need to seem “real” is undermined, rather than supported, by technical or futuristic artifacts. They don’t make good literature impossible, but they raise the bar to get an audience to suspend disbelief and to tell the underlying story that the reader wants. This is why genre fiction is such good fodder for farce. If the story doesn’t need these obstacles, it’s probably better off without them. But if the fun in writing with them can overcome their drag, the story could soar even with rockets. They’re just a heavy narrative load to bear.

What Should Science Fiction Be About?

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There is an endless debate about whether science fiction should be literature or genre fiction.  By that I mean should the story be about the humanity of the characters or about the rocket ships and ray guns.  Now this is an artificial dichotomy.  Even in the pulpiest of space operas, the humanity of the protagonists, even the humanity of the non-humans is always a factor.  But when the story basically becomes “Pride and Prejudice” with only a stray rocket ship thrown in as a fig leaf then we’ve stepped over the line to lit-sf.

A hundred years ago the pulp market said science fiction was about the rocket ships.  And that school of thought dominated during the first half of the twentieth century.  Sometime in the 1960s literary science fiction began.  I’m sure its roots go further back and it as yet was only the beginnings of what it would become, but the earlier dominance of space opera and pulp type stories began to give ground to more sophisticated writing styles and psychological and sociological considerations in the stories.  Women authors and progressives began to address social justice issues.

Sixty years later the pendulum has probably swung as far in the direction of literary science fiction as it can go.  Almost every science fiction publisher employs editors who probably wouldn’t allow a story published that ignored the social justice pieties that define the acceptable mindset of this editorial class.  And these approved stories have not been wildly successful.  In fact trad publishing is in pretty bad shape.  But with the advent of self-publishing the possibility exists for other types of stories to begin circulating again.

But the question still needs to be asked what are the relative sizes of the markets for “literary sf versus stories about rocket ships.  My guess is that if the right kind of rocket ship stories were available, they would garner at least half the market.  I think it’s the case that many of the boys that currently spend most of their time playing video games would be the market for this kind of science fiction.  Currently from what I’ve heard they read a kind of fan fiction that involves stories taking place in the “universe” of the games they like playing.  I assume they aren’t attracted to the literary sf but I could see them being attracted to more adventurous types of stories and these would fit more in line with the kind of pulp/space opera stories that used to make up science fiction.

Of course, it can be done backwards where writers of pulp sf could go to work producing this fan fiction to an already existing game universe.  But to me this seems restrictive.  Having to limit your creative directions according to a video game seems sophomoric.

But in reality, there are markets for all different kinds of stories.  The odd thing is that the traditional publishers and even Amazon act as gatekeepers to limit the types of stories that receive publicity and support.  In effect their limiting their own profits for ideological reasons.  So, this is the takeaway for authors.  In order to get seen you have to tailor your work to fit the gatekeepers’ requirements or you have to market your work to an audience that doesn’t know you’re there.

Well marketing is a serious business and based on what I’ve read cracking the Amazon algorithm is not for the faint of heart.  But still, I think trying to find an audience for your book is preferable to writing a book you don’t like in order to get an editor to approve it.

So, a marketing I will go.

16MAR2024 – And Now for a Message from Our Sponsor

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Saturday dawns sunny and brisk.  Very refreshing.  So much so that I resent sitting here to write.  But yesterday was a clamorous and dreary day of work.  So as Bob Cratchit observed, “I am behind my time.”  So here I am and I will take the time to provide cogent analysis on whatever it is that demands comment.  But “demands” is a stretch here.  I refuse to write further on Trump’s many legal battles.  When and if they reach a critical juncture, meaning, when they actually drag him off to the gulag, then I shall say my piece.

As for the latest political polls; yes, yes, we all know Trump’s winning.  Even a Democrat shill like Nate Silver is openly admitting that Biden is losing significant minority voters along with other important components of the Democrat coalition like the young and women.  But that’s all been said.  Sure, I’ll mention it in passing if it seems especially pointed.  But we are months and months away from even the conventions and by then, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny may be the Democrat candidate.  So, no, let’s put that aside for now.

I’ve already spoken about cannibal migrants this week.  Check.

Camera Girl has complained about the ruinous price of food including the corned beef for her birthday celebration this weekend.  Check.

Russians killing Ukrainians and Ukrainians killing Russians.  Check.  Check.

So, what, what, what?

Well, truth be told, I don’t feel like talking about any of that crap right now.  It’s been said and we can take a break from saying the same things again.

If you notice I’ve been putting up some stuff from movies and books.  I find this stuff makes me feel better.  And I’m looking for more of it.  This kind of stuff makes the day better and reinforces the things I think are good and healthy to think about.  And I openly encourage anyone who has anything that they want to share with the rest of the readers to link it and I’ll put it up.  Even Weird Al Yankovic (within reason of course).

Inevitably because I’m old and because a lot of what’s new stinks, the things I’ll point to will be old.  And the amount of high definition will be limited.  I hope my younger readers will forgive this.  But honestly watching some black and white footage won’t hurt any of them too badly.

I was thinking the other day that Shakespear died more than four hundred years ago and yet his English is still ninety percent understandable by even average readers.  Newness isn’t really a very good selection criterion for entertainment or really much of anything outside of technology.  Humans are still humans.  What needs to be done is to attempt to reintroduce the younger audience with their cultural heritage.  Whether it’s Shakespeare or the Marx Brothers, the human condition is pretty constant.  Iron Man and Odysseus are similar characters with similar problems.  Thor is just Achilles with CGI added in.

So, I apologize in advance if I stop banging away quite as often on how the end of Western Civilization is approaching and instead put-up examples of why we should care if Western Civilization is saved.  I’ll try to strike the right balance of outrage and fond remembrance so that your experience here is stimulating.

On with the show.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen; Lend Me Your Ears

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Mark Antony’s eulogy of Julius Caesar.  Everyone has heard the first few words.  They’re in my title.  But have you ever watched a dramatization?  Many years ago I saw a small production in the Berkshires.  And in its bare bones presentation; no fancy costumes or sets, it was well done.  But I do not remember Antony’s speech impressing me.

Here are three versions.  Two are Hollywood spectacles.  One with Marlon Brando and one with Charlton Heston.  The third is a solo recitation.  See if you can guess which one I favor.  And I’ll give those who care to watch them a chance to provide their own judgement on which is best.  Lend me your ears.

 

 

Which Version of Mark Antony's Speech is Best?

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