Category Archives: Fiction and Poetry

Battlestar Galactica and Narrative

Mark Bernstein provides this link to a Tribune Entertainment weblog, a discussion between Maureen Ryan and Ronald Moore on Battlestar Galactica, which sheds some light on the thinking behind the program. Twitter has lots of commentary on BSG and its conclusive episodes.

The final episode, indeed the last few years, of BSG have been fun, but also frustrating. The first year of the show was incredible, I thought, filled with dark drama and import, and my wife and I were hungry to continue our Friday SciFi habit. The first mini-series was one of he best dramatizations of mass-scale loss I’ve seen. Scary.

Battlestar’s visual metaphors are stunning, and its story premise is straightforward. The work is also filled with interesting relationships. Technology, order and chaos, love, faith, spirituality, betrayal–these ideas weave through the story and build complicated structures. Characters are neatly packaged: Adama begins skeptical of technological advancement, which saves his fleet, and ends in a situation of technological disemburdenment, pushed by his son. Adama’s is a character driven by loyalty in a world where ethic infrastructures are supported by wet toilet paper.

Battlestar is a classic exile tale. The Cylons attack and the denizens of Caprica are forced on a march toward ambiguous ends. On the way they must secure a means of government, environmental control, and on the way they must deal with loss and history, thus woven through exile is the story of discovery and revealed secrets. Battlestar comes deep with analogy. It’s a Bush era, 9-11 story of corruption, waste, insecurity, zealotry, distrust of unknown quantities, and arrogance.

Well, that’s just the intro. But to the beef. The final episodes reveal a problem with over-baked foreshadowing and expectation. A big bang is on the horizon and after lots of tremors, a great gold revealing will break from the earth and enumerate all the lose ends. Some great answer awaits, set up by grand foreshadowing and profound but gnostic imagery: who are the hidden Cylons; what secrets await in the Temple; how does this child, Hera, hold the secret to survival (apparently none), and so forth. The X-Files set this up and, of course, there was no great bang, as there was no secret to reveal. I don’t want long-standing secrets, though, I want some sensical and reasonable disentanglement.

Battlestar’s second season set up an unexpected and weak arc. Adama must save the citizens of New Caprica from their Cylon overlords as his son grows fat with guilt. It felt like ground already covered, it felt like character experimentation. In a subsequent season, Kara Thrace learns that she’d already been to Earth, or some Earth, and has returned to the fleet to assist the weakening survivors home. She just doesn’t know which home. I still don’t know what Earth they went to or why at the end. The question of Cylon identity in the story turned into a red herring, as did the foreshadows in the Temple, the numerology trivial (when isn’t it?). Jesse Abbot will attest that we already knew the notes were coordinates (when are they not?). Which gets me to the overall point.

The edits at the end were skillful, the camera moving from present to past. These images provided nothing new or significant to the people of the story, and they turned quickly into obvious manipulation: this is what that image meant. What’s the danger of authorial or intrusive narrators? They kill stories. After the music stopped, I regained my senses. “Hey dummy,” the camera said. “You’re not fit to put the story together yourself.”

I can’t say where the citizens went, and the notion of (de)evolution at the end makes no logical sense. 150,000 years later–huh? If I toss my iPod today, will my son’s son’s son’s son puzzle over a bow and arrow? I don’t get it. The business with cyclical occurrence needs explaining too. Generationally, repetition is debatable in the context of Time’s Arrow. We can make mistakes, as people did in the past, but as Kundera and others have argued, each generation is its own physical quantity, unless we’re working within a framework that admits it, which I guess we are in Battlestar, where the cycle “cannot be broken.” But the angelic toss at the end about “will me repeat?” and to affirm it in the positive seems like cheating and risks flushing the story into pretentious waters. We leave, also, with the old saw: that old darn technology is just stripping us of our souls issue. But I’ll leave that one alone.

Narrative and Discovery

I heard a wonderful radio program on NPR yesterday on Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. One of the interviewees was Herbie Hancock (I think). He talked about Miles Davis’ process, specifically on the single session, “first takes,” out of which Kind of Blue was “discovered” in the studio. He talked about how the modes were set and that part of the plan for Davis was to simply let the players go and in that “process of discovery” authentic ideas would come. Thus, when we listen to the music, we are always following that discovery as it happens.

Evans, Adderly, Coltrain and crew, of course, could pull it off. But the idea of discovering ideas “inside the process,” rather than as an act of “revision” has been on my mind a lot. Kind of Blue, as I listen to it, is filled with structure, craft, and surprise. It’s this kind of approach I want to explore in the next 100 project. As I look back at it, this is what 100 Days was all about.

Discovery. I don’t want to overuse the idea. But it’s important. More important, at this point, than worrying about perfection and revising.

Story Project

In order to prep for the summer project, I’m writing quick narratives and adding them to the mediaplay website. These are quickly written stories with little editing to bog down their progress, maybe some fixes to missing articles and the like. But the idea is not to edit but study problems, characters, plots and, most importantly, middles, with as little “rational bumbling” to get in the way. The Professor took about twenty minutes with John watching, while the new media students working during lab time. The problem overcome with The Professor was to figure out

1. Why the professor left the test
2. What he would do after leaving
3. What to purchase at the hardware store
4. To add wood frames to the door so that the nailgun would be reasonable

The Dream took about ten minutes and The Room little more than ten. The Dream was a question of what to leave out. The Room turned out to be a parody of Interactive Fiction and a reference to John’s “Castle of he Red Key” exercise. The Rat was one of those quick writes in bed.

Summer Project

Yup, I think the new project for the summer is coming together. I’m becoming more and more focused on studying dramatic and narrative patterns and their images.

The project will probably be one hundred stories, brief examinations and examples of plot, action, and character, one a day. I think John’s gearing up to follow with one hundred sound tracks, which will be really cool. This is a call for others to consider such a project also.

I’ve been practicing. I wrote a story this morning in about ten minutes and another a few days back in class while the students worked on their hypertexts, that one about twenty minutes. I’ll be posting them soon on the MediaPlay site.

On Dreams

I had an odd dream the other night. So, I wrote a story about it:

In a dream, a man lost his son. The son wouldn’t stop committing crimes. He wouldn’t stay in his room, no matter how much the man yelled for this. The son kept stealing the policeman’s handcuff key, pickpocketing wallets. He threatened the world with strange little fists and darted through rooms with a knife.

Outside, an asteroid, trailing great curls of smoke, arced down from a quiet sky, turned away the earth, and raced back into the atmosphere, the desperate cities below glowing orange.

The man woke up weeping, but he didn’t know why. He’d never lost his son in the waking world. In the waking world, his son was intelligent, thoughtful, well-mannered, somewhat clumsy in roomfulls of furniture, and his smile taught the man the mysteries of love.

“Why did I wake up crying?” the man asked his wife, but she didn’t know. In Argentina, he asked a man selling hotdogs on the street and the man gave him a hotdog with onions and peppers. In China they said we know less about dreams than we do about children but that asteroids are stones lurking among an ambience of mindless potency.

When he got home, the man found his son grown, mowing the lawn, grinning in the sun. The man’s knees throbbed and his face hurt from the winds of the sea. He raised a hand and waved to his son, surprised at how green the trees hung, how the smell of grass migrated across the drive in gusts. His son raised a hand back, and he aimed the mower at a patch of ground grown wild. Inside, the man kissed his wife. He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, peeled off his worn clothes, and lay down and went to sleep.

Tunxis Poets

Jackie Majerus of the Bristol Press has a write-up on our excellent poet, Sara Nichols:

A Tunxis Community College student, Sarah Nichols, will be among the young poets from Yale, Trinity College, Wesleyan and other Connecticut colleges selected to showcase their work throughout the state.

Nominated by Tunxis English Professor Sally Terrell, Nichols was named one of five Connecticut student poets, a group that is part of the Connecticut Poetry Circuit. She’s the only community college student selected to take part in the college tour this year and the first ever from Tunxis.

We’re proud of Ms. Nichols, who has a fresh professionalism about her. Here’s Sara on her work:

Nichols said her poems are often focused on art and her interaction with it. She wrote one work about her reaction to the film, “No Country for Old Men.”

“It’s intended to be blackly humorous,” Nichols said.

Others, she said, are highly personal and are drawn from her own experiences.

One of those is about electro-convulsive therapy, often referred to as shock treatment, something she first had at age 18.

“I’ve gone through it many times since,” Nichols said, as treatment for depression. “Fundamentally it changed me. It changed my life. Writing it down, trying to make sense out of it in poetry, maybe it’s a way of putting it away.”

I’ve read the mentioned poem on “No Country for Old Men.” I say, go Sara! This Poetry Circuit business has been a real thrill.

Form

At the moment form is killing me. We talked about this at a meeting the other day, one of our members asking about it–who should have known better.

Anyway, it’s something you carve away from a larger hunk, in many cases, rather than building up from something wet and clayey between your shoes. Stanzas and paragraphs, for example. They’re vulnerable to arbitrariness. In the case of stanzas, we have white space to wedge between them for the sake of sound, emphasis, rhythm, and image.

A first and last line is important. But a stanza has a first and last line, too. How to wrestle and strip them down to their focus, which the center of a circle, which has to mean something.

Tinderbox and StretchText Part 2

It’s been a long haul but thanks to Jim Revillini the final step in the jQuery stretchtext code for Tinderbox is complete.  Here’s the code:

$(document).ready(function() {
$(‘.stretchTarget’).hide();
$(‘a.stretcher’).toggle(
function() {
//Here we find the talk-to element
var trg = getStretchTarget(this.rel);
trg.fadeIn(1500);
},
function() {
var trg = getStretchTarget(this.rel);
trg.fadeOut(1500);
}
);
});

function getStretchTarget (trg_class) {
//console.log(trg_class, $(‘.’ + trg_class)); for firebug
return $(‘.’ + trg_class);
}

The trg variable and getStretchTarget call solve the problem of identifying multiple links in a Tinderbox note.  In the first iteration, I was limited to one link and one target–okay but not thorough.

Here’s the new example, with some nested divs to show a “drilling effect” in one section of my poem “That Night I Saw . . .”

The preparation for implementation is interesting, but for those writers using Tinderbox I think the requirements are quite simple: the jQuery framework, a stylesheet linked to the Tinderbox template, the javascript code in the template so that exported notes can take advantage, and then–most importantly–a sense of “why” to implement the stretchtext aesthetic into prose, poetry or whatever other document.  This, of course, is the fun part.  This project has been about opening the canvass, as the code can be tied to any container element, any media type, and whatever design exists on the backend in a template.  It can be simple, it can be complex.

Here’s what the note looks like in Tinderbox:

stretchpoem

The markup in this example demonstrates how complicated two stretchtext elements can be, not in terms of additional symbols, but in terms of how the effect advances any one reading of the poem, as any link may be ignored.  In the finalized poem, links to other stanzas and sections might exist within a hidden element, thus advancing a plural coherence.

That’s the idea at least.  For, markup notwithstanding, this opens the Tinderbox note canvass to further exploration for written forms, the codework happening behind the scenes during export and during reading, leaving the writer to worry about the nature of their work.  That Night I Saw on My Homeward Way as a poem will simply be one example of that exploration.

Hyperdrama and More

Wow, it’s been a busy couple of weeks.

The beginning of the semester is always rough, getting info understood, munching down on committee work, and wrestling with the continual work of curriculum development. Charles Deemer will soon be teaching an online hyperdrama course for us (Spring 2010) and docs are being written for the new media program, casting up our best effort for program establishment and transfer.

In addition, I’ve added a few features to That Night I Saw, which will add cyclical twists to the internal navigation of the poem, especially when it comes to intermediate stopping points. But, realy, what’s important is the internal language, and what’s interesting is how links emerge naturally from the poem’s structure.

I’ve been back to reading Octavio OPaz. Reading his poetry always jiggles the concretion and relationship handle. I’ve been bothering too much with the technology, I’ve learned, playing with half-backed concepts rather than with the real work of mining, dredging, and bricklaying.

My Own Praise Poem

Is there edge more
dangerous than snowflake
on the air in summertime,
an omen, maybe, of the sun
dimming to nothing,
or weary grown,
or just waiting
for the praise of birds.

I’ve known what it feels
to be at the bottom of an iron shoe
crushed under lake ice,
scratching to breathe.

One day I rose to the warm
of a morning after
weeks and weeks
(perhaps it was a thousand years of blindness)
enduring showers of rocks from the clouds
too much
for the summer grass
and the frond-bound frogs
and the smothered day laborers,
and opened my window to a breeze
that brushed my cheeks like fingers.

Cast back the weft of those days
when you heard dogs bark
somewhere in the night
–far away–
Suck in the smell
of baking bread
and grilled meat–
boiled sugar–
and testaments
on old paper.
Listen to the booming of the trains
chained in those smoky downtown yards
where cats watch from between cans
the stars stream
above sleeping towers.

Some where a body rolls
in on the tide.
A voice like copper wire
cuts my arm.
I smear blood
with a shuddering thumb
into images of hillside children
bouncing and bruising their persons
on the greens,
calling into the shadows
for all the sweet in fruit
and the potent enormities in soil
to squeeze into themselves
as we, watchfully,
with heavy fingers,
wonder at how listless we are
and dull
with the imagination
of weeds
while they
like chimes
cut the wind into glass.