It took me a few years of probing into a character to find out why he doesn’t like books. This is brother Sandoval, the protagonist of my hypertext novel, The Life of . . . .

There’s a conversation that happens with another man in New Mexico and Sandoval goes off on a dramatic dissertation on the problem with books. It’s more complicated than just one reason, but it also has a lot to do with hypertext. Sandoval writes the story but feels that a book wouldn’t be the right way to go about telling “his.” Fortunately, hypertext provides the vehicle, or, better, “the answer.”

The question of method helps uncover Sandoval’s problem, small and trivial as it may seem. Books are built not to be read but to be closed and shelved. For Sandoval, a book is a form of storage technology. The spine of a book doesn’t make sense to him in that it works better closed than open, unlike a hinge, whose angle of pressure never changes, swinging or at rest. A book is a physical and magical mystery: 1) closed, it’s worthless and impossible to uncover 2) opened, it begs to be closed.

Wander through Zak Smith’s illustrations of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. From Creon Upton’s intro

Zak Smith’s Illustrations, then, is not Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow. It is a major work, but it is not a career-defining work. Pynchon (we assume) put the better part of a decade into his novel; Smith put in a year. Pynchon’s depth of research alone is staggering. When he describes an everyday item in the novel, we can feel sure of the historical accuracy (or deliberate inaccuracy) of his description; Smith, on the other hand, takes his inspiration from the novel itself, without much recourse to the historical world it describes. Smith seems to realise that his illustrations are subordinate to the novel in this respect. He is not attempting to create the visual equivalent of Gravity’s Rainbow; rather, wisely, he is attempting to supplement the novel with a visual interpretation that respects the novel’s form, manner and tone.

Susan Gibb mentions a point of dicussion at our last Narratives writing group meeting (the meeting was fabulous by the way) that had to do with character. Read what she writes here. The idea is interesting. There are lots of ways of treating character beyond conflict resolution issues and theories of drama, and I’ve taken a lot from Kundera and Borges in their own extrapolations and examinations.

It’s difficult for me to deal with the issue in the abstract and enjoy considering the notion of character simply by writing them.

Consider the post below, which deals with a little character test. First, subtract the term character and insert “person.”

Okay, how about Hal. Name.
We know he has two arms, but if he doesn’t this matters.
Hal . . .
And so it begins.

The discussion at he meeting had to do with my assertion that a writer may want to get into Hal as an actor who goes beyond the writer’s experiences. That is, if the writer senses that Hal is a murderer, then the writer must write him as he is. This concept is impossible to verify, since Hal is a fiction, and I don’t always want to involve metacognition into fiction as thinking.

Let’s say Hal is in Mexico talking to a woman on a street corner in Aguas Calientes. I’ve been in that town, but I never spoke to a women there on the street corner. Let’s say Hal is lost and knows no Spanish. Let’s say the writer suspects that the story ends with Hal leaving the woman’s apartment with the woman’s brother.

I have experienced none of this. But this is the fun part. Not figuring out why the story ends as it does, not worrying about whether the story is good or will be well received, not even worrying about whether the story actually ends this way. No, the fun part is writing the possibilities, writing Hal’s experience as it unfolds, pushing out farther and farther from the center, outward and outward into strange territory, into the underwater territories of McCarthy’s wonderful Blood Meridian whale. How many story writers have surprised themselves with a “Wow, I didn’t know that” about Hal or about this woman. “So that’s what happened,” the writer might say. “I didn’t know I could think that,” the writer might say.

In this story, I surprised myself with the realization that the tragedy is not about the outcome, but that the man simply cannot do what he once could do, that somehow the critical things are no longer about him. That’s why the lines got written. Maybe.

Hal then. What does he do; what’s in the way; how does he surmount? What boundaries does he cross?

Enter the Man. He may be tall; he may lean or be lean. He wants to be someone, so he is. His hat is red, brown, or yellow, but either way, the hat clashes with his eyes. But what does he lead to in this protohypertext? Gender tones? Some strife that involves ice or a shallow fall? Fights with the local law over the widths of things? Debating? He points, and another man moves forward, follows the finger, shakes his head.

He’s had a fleck of metal in his heal for as long as he can remember.

He’s married, but he’s forgotten when it all happened. He’s not married and wants to be. He’s prone to bickering with a mill file and an ax. He says thing’s like, “The handle is broken” and “That mouse in my knee has claws sharper than . . .”

When he sees people enter, he closes his eyes and dashes off. But what images reside in his memory? Blocks of yellow? The smell of sod after rain? Subsiding boot sounds on wood? A brother’s voice saying, “Fooled ya”? Water bumping through stones or brushing against?

The man is prone to saying things like, “I wish he would just get on with it” and “I wish I could write another tale, because this one pains me.”

The End

I guess it would be an odd sensation, reading about a character in a fiction–a woman maybe–who is someone you’ve actually met.

From Jordan Davis on poetry and teaching via Josh Corey

This is a basic pedagogical problem. Teaching is not really a job, or anyway, it ought to be compensated on Equity or SAG scale — the people who do that job are actors. The ones who communicate their enthusiasms model how to make thoroughness and lively interest come naturally. The indifferent ones euthanize their subjects. I imagine there are some subjects impervious to drill-n-kill, and I’m pretty sure I “came to poetry” via a French teacher who was outright hostile to verse and claimed to teach it only to meet the requirements of the AP exam. Ne’ertheless, I keep wondering what if even just ten percent of poetry MFA recipients taught high school English. Would all these post-rational neo-Slovenian wandering souls have an effect on teaching itself? would the day to day requirements of focusing a group’s attention change the poets’ work for the better? Most importantly, would we get to see hot young actors and actresses playing poets (link) in inspiring films? Anyway.

This quote, a well known one, by Alice Munro just kills me.

I guess I’m a kind of anachronism… because I write about places where your roots are and most people don’t live that kind of life any more at all. Most writers, probably, the writers who are most in tune with our time, write about places that have no texture, because this is where most of us live.

I don’t buy it, but I sense the question of change here, like watching 24 hour news and thus washed over by the “present.” Texture must be sense, the sense of space and the suitability of being in it. I don’t buy it because I wont necessarily live where my son or daughter “will” live. Munro’s stories draw me because they pull at the notion of memory from many directions. The recall the smaller elements of experience. These become vast.

Brenda Hillman’s poem Arroy on hand at The Missouri Review is nicely rendered. Here’s a small taste:

Now she sees the dry ditch
as it is:
the glint of litter,
chrome of the abandoned fender,
how all things unloved, rushed, pushed out
to the great sea against their will survive,
and sees behind the broken feldspar
the expert shabbiness of daily life.

I like this terrain, this narrator, and this child about to step into the world.

Susand Gibb writes

We all lust, but some get a tablespoon more of this element than others. We all have fear, measured out and weighed against our strength and audacity. Is this what Aureliano has learned locked in Melquiade’s room since shortly after the loss of Jose Arcadio Segundo? Or are we learning something that Marquez himself is willing to share with us from his own experience as a writer.

Strength and audacity. This is an interesting combination.