Historical Fiction and the real world

Very nice blog post by Michael K. Reynolds on the ways that one can interface fiction and history. He offers three possibilities – The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Strategy (“if your lead character is Winston Churchill in the early 1940’s, you are going to have a difficult time with it not being swallowed up by World War II themes. However; if you shift your lead character to a young man from India who happened to immigrate to England at the onset of the war, then this can take on a much different path”), The Monet Approach (“the idea that blurred detailing can actually provide a powerful and succinct image”), and The Character Pigeon (“use a minor character (or characters) to carry the weight of the prevalent, but non-centric theme. That way you’re not ignoring it, but you’re freeing your lead characters to swim in the main waters of your story”).

It started me thinking about some of the ways I’ve dealt with history in my own work. In my most recent, Nick and Jake, the era – and the specific year, 1953 – are central to the story. Bringing Nick Carraway and Jake Barnes into 1953 was important in that it gave a new perspective on the seminal characters of a key period in American literature, but it was also important in that it gave a new perspective on that year.

But for all that history was important, we still had to play fast and loose with a few odd details. The overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, which was the first CIA exercise in overthrowing the government of another country, changed the history  of the Middle East irrevocably, and not the way the CIA expected it to.

We wrote Nick and Jake partly in response to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy, resulted in America having and then losing the sympathy and support of international opinion. We were struck by how much this mirrored the 1950s, when America went from being the country that had saved the world from the Nazis, to being The Ugly American. The thing that made the Iran coup so devastatingly successful was that no one believed the Americans would ever do such a thing. So it was a perfect metaphor for us.

But it had happened in the fall of 1953, and the action of Nick and Jake is in the spring of 1953. But it was too good for our plot to leave out…so we moved it up a few months.

Our ingénue  moves to New York from the Midwest and undergoes some significant changes. Where would she stay in the big city, a young, innocent girl? Why, the Martha Washington Hotel for Women. And nothing says Martha Washington Hotel for women in the 50s like Valley of the Dolls. Only trouble is, no one really remembers, or cares about, the characters in Valley of the Dolls any more. Not that that would have bothered us so much, except that we didn’t remember or care about the characters either. Jacqueline Susann, the novel’s author, interested us as a colorful character and a symbol of a certain literary/political zeitgeist. Only trouble there was, unlike her characters, Jackie Susann was over fifty, married, and living a totally different life from that of her characters. This might have bothered us more than it did, if we hadn’t discovered it only after we had begun writing her into the book. By the time we knew that she wasn’t really one of her characters, we liked her too much to let her go. So we shaved thirty years off her age – historically inaccurate, but that’s really the time and place she’s associated with.

Here’s a character we pulled from history out of necessity. When we went to do the audio dramatization of Nick and Jake, we were fortunate enough to have Valerie Plame Wilson offer to play a role, but there was no role for her. Who was important in the politics and cultural politics of 1953? Clare Boothe Luce! She was perfect for the story, and perfect for Valerie – and of course, since Valerie was playing her, we twisted history a little and made her an undercover CIA agent. And who’s to say she wasn’t?

More on history, and other historical novels, next time.

Artists Studio Tour

Saugerties Artists Studio Tour was this past weekend. I opened my studio for two days -- actually opening my studio only involves lifting the lid up on my laptop, so I compensate by turning the Barbara Fite Room of the House on the Quarry into a showroom.

Lizard

 Anyway, I met a nice bunch of people -- probably about a hundred visitors on each day, and a few sales. I don't really show my work in galleries very often, so the Art Tour is my main showcase.

Bunkhouse Guitar

Nude with Flower

 Here are a few pieces from this year, representing the different styles of work that I do. "Lizard" is 21st century pointillism, done with mouse and Microsoft Paint, background in Photoshop.
  "Bunkhouse Guitar" is my black and white faux-woodcut style, also with mouse and MS Paint, using the freeform shape too and the invert command.
  "Nude with Flower" is iPad, ArtStudio and finger.


In a conversation during the tour, I found myself remembering when I lived in New York in the 70s, and I'd find myself late at night on the subway, starting to notice some simple stick figures that someone was drawing on the black empty spaces where posters had not yet been put up. I was blown away by how good they were, and I kept telling myself I was going to come down one night with a razor blade and cut one of them out, to keep for my own. But I never got around to it. That's why I don't have an original Keith Haring in my collection.

What our lives are really like

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Elizabeth Strout is a first rate writer, and I should have liked this more than I did. She has a fine ability to zero in on the subtleties of what's wrong with people. But I don't know...I think that what's really wrong with people is that witches keep telling them they can be king if they'll only murder a bunch of people, or that they've killed their father and married their mother, or even that their balls have been shot off and their girlfriend is having it on with a bullfighter. Those ring a bell with all of us, right?
I kept wanting this book, and these people, to mean more to me.

View all my reviews

Brave, courageous and bold...

Doc by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Got better and better as it went along. I ended up loving it. Probably about 85 percent real history, presented as a novel, but a sort of metafiction, with the author stepping beyond the fourth wall to talk to about the characters and their place in history,

I've written a novel -- Tempest of Tombstone -- about these characters -- the Earps, Kate Elder, Doc Holliday -- in Tombstone, and I did a lot of research for that -- nothing like the incredible research Russell has done -- but I knew very little about the Dodge City years.

Se gets so much right about the Old West, pointing out that a sheriff or deputy in Dodge City was essentially a small town policeman, breaking up fights between drunks, getting raccoons out from under buildings, answering calls to domestic disputes. Very little in the way of Gunsmoke - type gunplay. I also get so df NRA types - and anti-NRA types -- talking about the good (or bad, depending on your point of view) old days of Wyatt Earp and the Wild West where everyone carried guns and weren't afraid to use them. Wyatt Earp was the original gun control advocate, which is the reason why the Earps' reputations were destroyed by the gunfight at the OK Corral, even though they won it.

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Minutes of the Last Meeting

I used to give an assignment -- eavesdrop on conversations, and write down anything that you hear someone say in iambic pentameter. The purpose was to get poetry students away from the idea that metrical poetry has to be forced, or singsongy. I would tell them, at first this will seem impossible, but once you start hearing them, you'll hear them everywhere, and the real problem will become how to turn it off. Your girlfriend tells you, "I slept with your best friend the other night," and your response is, "That's great!" "It is?" "Yes, it's iambic pentameter!"

Anyway, one of the first times I gave this assignment, I decided to do it myself during a faculty meeting. I mean, you have to do something during a faculty meeting, don't you, to avoid going bonkers with boredom? So I started writing down lines, and pretty soon I had two pages of a notebook filled, and...I realized...a poem about academic life.

So here it is.

MINUTES OF THE LAST MEETING

It wouldn't interfere with what we do;

I couldn't really poll the entire group.

Very, very briefly, here's the plan--

Elect the chairs of two committees first

(Able to run for these positions first)

Who'll want to lead the faculty towards greatness.

Within the AAC or SAC,

At least two people -- one is not enough –

The faculty at large will vote for chairs,

The AAC, I find, now having done it.

The AAC, last Monday, voted no

—Selected by the faculty at large—

And they pick someone who they think can lead.

Maybe the better thing would be to keep…

We have to somehow pull it all together.

Did everyone get a chance to sign the sheet?

There are seven searches underway

From a variety of different fields --

I know I’m getting questions all the time.

It’s not as academic a position,

The college writing program and the core.

There is the dean search, which is underway

A lot of applications were dismissed

This selection didn’t represent --

I don’t know anything about the search --

Is uppermost in everybody’s mind --

And in the end, of course, it’s Artine’s choice.

Ignore or Fight?

Back in the seventies, I was working in New York for a magazine, and in connection with an article, I had to go and talk to a guy named Alan Shackleton, who was a sleazy exploitation film producer.

At this time, there was a lot of press being given to rumors about a  "snuff film" made in South America, a porn film that ended with an actual murder on camera. Shackleton, when I got to his office, was making plans to capitalize on the rumors. He had a cheap slasher movie, and he had quickly added a new ending to it involving a fake killing of the lead actress, or someone who he hoped looked enough like her, since the original movie had been shot several years earlier. When I walked in, they were all sort of in a panic. The film was so tame, in addition to being so lame, that the film review board was giving it an R rating. So they were scurrying around to find a piece of film from a porno movie that could be shoehorned in somewhere.

Apparently they succeeded, because the film opened a few days later with an X rating, the title of "Snuff," and the tagline "Filmed in South America...where life is cheap."

But meanwhile, when I got home that night, my girlfriend was making plans with a women's group to picket the theater when the movie opened.

"Oh, God, no," I said."Don't do that. Being picketed is this guy's only hope of making a profit on this movie. It's so awful no one will go to see it after the first day, but if the protest makes the TV news, that's box office gold for them."

But she and her group would not be dissuaded, and they did picket, and the film did make some money for Shackleton.

So I was right.

Maybe. You're really never wrong to stand up against the truly awful in society. I still think I was right...sometimes you're just playing into the bastards' hands. But maybe the bigger picture is it's not OK, and you always have to say it's not OK when it's not.

How a poem comes together (sometimes)

I just found these old notes on my hard drive while looking for something else. They must have been something I started doing for a class at some time. I seem to have been following the genesis and development of a particularly slippery poem. The notes were apparently originally handwritten, and then transcribed over.  I have no idea how much time went by between one and the next. I'm guessing that the lines of poetry and the metrical notations were the handwritten notes, and the exigeses came when I typed them all up.

FIRST PAGE OF NOTES

I was thinking of writing a ghazal, and since I’ve been thinking a lot about a possible  connection between ghazal and blues, I began with

                the blues

and then tried to fit a couple of lines to it

The first crack of light in the morning was the blues

When all shadows were shadow, that was the blues

and at the same time, I written a phrase I liked the sound of

striped like snakes

and I started thinking of light – morning light, maybe morning light across a bed, striped like a snake, and the next line I tried was this:

She woke up in the morning with her arms around the blues

The morning light lay like a striped

SECOND PAGE

that seems to be as far as I got with that thought. I was in the process of deciding I didn’t want to use “blues” as the monorhyme end word in a ghazal. The next couplet I tried was (brackets around works that were crossed out):

Morning [began] started like a [striped] snake across her bed;

When all shadows were shadow, the dark was her bed.

So I’d gotten rid of two things I really thought I wanted to work with, the blues and “striped snake.”

The next thing I was going to get rid of was the ghazal. It wasn’t working for me; I didn’t feel it. But I still liked the formal regularity of the line, and I knew that the lines and rhythms I was hearing were formal. I decided to try a villanelle.

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

When the shadows clustered into shadow

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

Then, on the back of the page, a bunch of scattered notes. I was trying to find rhythms that I liked.

  -     /     -        /    -    /      -   /       -    /

day slithered like a snake across her bed

   /        -         /  -    /       -   /      -     /

Day slipped like a snake across her bed.

    /     -       /      -     /   -    /    -

Shadows clustered into shadow

and a bunch of possible rhyme words for the B rhyme:

shadow

meadow

arrow

tallow

and under the list of rhyme words, another line:

hair like snakeskin stretched across her bed

which seems to mean I was moving away from the snake-as-sunbeam image, and this is maybe an example of letting a fine isolated verisimilitude go by.  I think snake-as-sunbeam may well be a pretty good image. But I was allowing myself not to be locked into it, to look around for other possibilities.

So here’s what fills up the rest of this page:

Like a snake she’d let into her bed

which I guess I hated. I hate it now, looking at it. The metric pattern forces the line to sound stilted and awkward – “LIKE a SNAKE she’d LET inTO her BED” -  which puts that horrible, ugly stress on TO. So under it, I have a note for the stress I want:

/    -   into bed  (DA – duh INto BED)

and under that, a line that fits the meter:

Like a snake she’d followed into bed

which I also liked better as a plot line, but I seem to have abandoned it. I go on to try a couple of other lines, using one of the “B” rhyme words. I didn’t have the whole lines, just this much:

-    /     -    /   pretended she was dead

/  -    /    -   , made her skin like tallow

and then filling out the lines (indicating words crossed out, words stuck in, and in the third line, a stressed syllable that had to go in, but I didn’t have yet):

For two days, she pretended she was dead,

                         felt

[made] her arms ^  like clay, [her] breasts like tallow,

Hair [hung] like snakeskin   /   across her bed.

Then, on the back of the page, a couple of lines that don’t seem to be going anywhere, and I think I knew they weren’t going anywhere:

When she was seventeen and newly wed,

 What men were   /    -    pierced her like an arrow

PAGE THREE

By now, I had the beginnings of a poem:

The day slipped like a snake across her bed,

And when the shadows clustered into shadow,

She pulled the darkness up around her head.

They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead.

She showed her arms like clay, her breasts like tallow,

Her skin shed like a snake’s across her bed.

And it was working pretty well. Except I didn’t like it. I liked the image of breasts like tallow, but “arms like clay” didn’t do much for me. It seemed to be just there for the meter, to fill out the line. “They challenged her to prove she wasn’t dead” seemed like a nice line. It was metrically regular. It said something interesting. Why didn’t I like it?

Looking at it again now, I do kinda like it, and I like the formal poem that’s starting to take shape. But at that point – and I hope my instincts were right – I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the form, and I really didn’t like the meter. I wanted to break free of it...into free verse, as a matter of fact. I guess that’s why they call it free verse.

PAGE FOUR

So I changed “wasn’t dead” to “was alive,” and I broke it into two lines, to shake myself loose from the metric regularity:

To show them she was

alive, she wriggled free from

her skin, like a snake, and now

her new breasts were soft, like tallow,

So I’d completely and finally abandoned the snake-as-sunlight image. Too bad, maybe. Or OK, maybe. Anyway, I needed to start stripping things down. I knew I liked the image of breasts like tallow to suggest a new, moist, not-quite-formed body emerging from the shed outer layer of skin. Here’s the next start:

To prove to all three of them she was

alive, she shrugged free from

her skin, like a snake, and when

she turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

[and her hands]

[and] her hair was downy, and white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was fast, she had

pads of air under her feet.

[and] She could move in any direction,

she could spin and dance like a leaf.

I tried out the “three of them” to see if they’d open up an interesting plot line, but they didn’t, so I let them go. This was pretty much the last hand-written draft.

That's the end of the notes I have in this file. If there were more intermediate steps, I don't remember them. But here's the finished poem.

PROOF

They asked her to prove she was real,

so she shrugged out of

her skin like a snake, and when she

turned around, her new breasts

were soft, like tallow,

her hair was white like milkweed,

and she blinked in the light.

But she was sudden, she had

pads of air under her feet.

She could move in any direction.

She could flip and scoot like a leaf.

She turned into shadow with the shadows.

  

Books and movies

I'm reading The Green Mile, by Stephen King. I haven't read a lot of Stephen King, but I've liked what I've read. I'm reading this one because it was originally published as a serial, and that's something I've been thinking about a lot.

Anyway, one always talks about books and movies, how the book is almost always better, but of course that's not true. As Howard Hawks said, often a good book will make a bad movie, but a bad book can make a great movie. High Noon came from a Saturday Evening Post story which no one remembers. Shane is from a Western novel that no one reads any more. Maybe genre fiction has a better chance at becoming better on film.  I read somewhere that Clint Eastwood acquired The Bridges of Madison County specifically because he wanted the challenge of turning a perfectly awful book into a good movie. Maybe he succeeded...I spared myself reading the book, and the movie was watchable. David R. Slavitt, poet and translator (his version of Ovid's Metamorphosis was not loved by some critics, but they were wrong -- it's brilliant), translated The Fables of Avianus from Latin. Are they an overlooked masterpiece? I asked him. No, he said. Avianus was a terrible writer. That's why I chose him -- so all the literary credit for the translation can go to me.

The Wizard of Oz is regarded by many as one of the greatest movies of all time, and although the books are beloved, it's hard to imagine anyone putting them on the best books of all time list. Still, I can imagine someone saying, "The book was better."

What about movies that are pretty nearly exactly as good as the book? I'd put The Green Mile on that list.

Lots of novels are written these days with the idea that they'll be made into movies, and the novels are written almost like screen treatments. They generally make serviceable novels, and serviceable movies -- neither is likely to stand out.

An odd exception to this generalization: Grahame Greene's The Tenth Man. Quoting from Wikipedia: "In the introduction to the First edition of his novel, Graham Greene states that he had forgotten about this story until receiving a letter about it from a stranger in 1983. Greene had first suggested it as an idea for a film script in 1937, and later developed it whilst working for MGMduring the 1940s. Nothing came of it and the rights were offered for sale by MGM in 1983. The buyer allowed Greene to revise and subsequently publish the work."

So The Tenth Man was actually written as a screen treatment, but it made a wonderful short novel. Interestingly, when it was eventually filmed with Anthony Hopkins, it wasn't a very good movie.

But back to The Green Mile. The book basically is the movie. The prose is straightforward, the story is the same in both versions. The one literary device that King uses, which is interesting and unobtrusive, is the moving back and forth in time by the first person narrator. The narrator places himself in a nursing home, maybe 40 or 50 years after the action of the novel, which is in the 1930s. So although he's essentially narrating the story as it happens, he's narrating a story that he knows the ending of, so he can jump forward in time and tell you what's going to happen.

Poem online

A poem at Halvard Johnson'sOn Barcelona website.

Who gets paid what?

A rant I posted in response to a Facebook post wherein the writer announced that the recent salary increase given to Seattle pitcher Felix Hernandez had made him hate baseball.

I've never understood all this rooting for management in baseball. It's unique to sports, especially baseball. No one is going to post that they hate computer software because Google pays a top software designer 20 million, or they hate Hollywood because Leonardo diCaprio gets 20 mil for Blood Diamond.
But baseball owners are so historically stupid -- they're the one group of capitalists who have led the fight to denigrate their own product, because they hated free agency so much...they preferred the old indentured servitude system where a Ralph Kiner had to accept a pay cut after leading the league in home runs, because he had nowhere else to go. What other business would have done this? Can you imagine, in the same era, a movie studio advertising BATMAN -- starring Jack Nicholson, who got paid $6 million plus a percentage, and boy, did that ham ever not deserve it?
Putting this in historical perspective again, at the same time that baseball owners were waging a PR campaign against their own product, a Broadway producer who understood publicity, Sonny Werblin, took over the Jets, and immediately paid a young college quarterback, Joe Namath, twice what the competitive rate at the time was. And instead of bitching and moaning about the salary, Werblin played it up -- built a positive PR campaign around it. Result -- the AFL shot up in the awareness of fans and players, and became a gold mine. This was around the same time that Lamar Hunt of the Hunt oil family was losing a million dollars a year with the Houston Oilers. A shocked sportswriter -- probably one of those in the pocket of baseball management -- reported this to daddy H. L. Hunt, who said "Uh-oh. At that rate, he'll only be able to run the team for another 200 years."
Seattle's ownership made what looks to be a smart business decision. They've made their fan base feel proud by locking up the team's best and most popular player. They've shown that they're serious about building a winning team, and that will make the Mariners a more attractive proposition to other free agents. And are you really going to root for those owners who've taken the luxury tax established by baseball to give small market teams a chance to compete, and put it in their own pockets?