Adam Rubinstein's Blog, page 2
January 22, 2011
Deliberately Obfuscated, Very Important Statement
The burdens of force-fitting lift when you realize who's who. One degree shifts on the kaleidoscope and a six month headache was never there.
Next Levels of Dramatic Irony
Your experience as a standard reader:
Fig. A: Wetu.Toward the end of Pat's rendition of Weetamoo's diary, the sachem-to-be is finally called for her adulthood rite. The year is 1654. She's been anticipating it most of the book; she'll spend several days and nights in a sweatlodge, tending a fire and waiting for contact from the nonmaterial world. In her two visions, a deer she'd unceremoniously killed leads her through the winter night to an important fishing area to the Pocasset, downstream from a waterfall. The second night, the deer leads her to an important fishing area, downstream from a waterfall, where she encounters older versions of herself with Metacom, her sister, and child. Metacom is painting bloodroot on their faces. She wonders why Wamsutta is missing. When she emerges from her vision, the fire in her wetu is almost out. The elders tell her later that most of her responsibility in this initiation was "to keep the fire going."
Your experience as a reader with a dash of history:
Weetamoo is peering into a future. The year is probably early-mid 1675. She's married several men, most recently Wamsutta, who has been poisoned by foot-stomping Pilgrims. Metacom has been gathering indigenous forces against the English, and is now leaning on his sister-in-law to fold her Pocassets into his army, which she will. She will also drown, crossing the Taunton River, a year later.
Let's look at this structurally.
In standard-issue dramatic irony, the reader knows something the characters don't. It creates an inimitable tension, which keeps you turning those pages. It's such the standard of story-telling in Hollywood you might notice its absence more clearly: think of how behind the plot you feel watching The Big Lebowski or Burn After Reading. What an easier ride these stories are the second time around.
Fig. B: The multiverse giveth; the Multiverse taketh away.With historical stories, you get something else, which Pat's working subtly. Here, the reader, before the story, knows what's coming. Let's call this Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. The text refers to a point in history – which to the speaker, is unknowably in the future – which the reader is already familiar with. The reader becomes a time-traveler.
There's another model we can tease from this: the text can present events out of sequence, creating a pseudo- Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. You encounter effect before cause. (Think Memento.)
Deeper, there's reverse causality, in which the effect happens before the cause.
If we write the events in a modular way, with loose causality, and structure the text so that no one can't predict the order of events, this gets exciting. The reader has multiple, equally plausible narratives. And without an external grasp of the history, plausibility may as well be reality. Narrative becomes impossibly problematic, and the story untrustworthy. We need narrative structure in our history, to understand ourselves, and without it, we're hopeless.
This is the structure I'm pursuing for Saltwater Dredge.
Of course, none of this makes it easier to visit the past, body and all.
None of it brings Pat back.
Fig. A: Wetu.Toward the end of Pat's rendition of Weetamoo's diary, the sachem-to-be is finally called for her adulthood rite. The year is 1654. She's been anticipating it most of the book; she'll spend several days and nights in a sweatlodge, tending a fire and waiting for contact from the nonmaterial world. In her two visions, a deer she'd unceremoniously killed leads her through the winter night to an important fishing area to the Pocasset, downstream from a waterfall. The second night, the deer leads her to an important fishing area, downstream from a waterfall, where she encounters older versions of herself with Metacom, her sister, and child. Metacom is painting bloodroot on their faces. She wonders why Wamsutta is missing. When she emerges from her vision, the fire in her wetu is almost out. The elders tell her later that most of her responsibility in this initiation was "to keep the fire going."Your experience as a reader with a dash of history:
Weetamoo is peering into a future. The year is probably early-mid 1675. She's married several men, most recently Wamsutta, who has been poisoned by foot-stomping Pilgrims. Metacom has been gathering indigenous forces against the English, and is now leaning on his sister-in-law to fold her Pocassets into his army, which she will. She will also drown, crossing the Taunton River, a year later.
Let's look at this structurally.
In standard-issue dramatic irony, the reader knows something the characters don't. It creates an inimitable tension, which keeps you turning those pages. It's such the standard of story-telling in Hollywood you might notice its absence more clearly: think of how behind the plot you feel watching The Big Lebowski or Burn After Reading. What an easier ride these stories are the second time around.
Fig. B: The multiverse giveth; the Multiverse taketh away.With historical stories, you get something else, which Pat's working subtly. Here, the reader, before the story, knows what's coming. Let's call this Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. The text refers to a point in history – which to the speaker, is unknowably in the future – which the reader is already familiar with. The reader becomes a time-traveler.
There's another model we can tease from this: the text can present events out of sequence, creating a pseudo- Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. You encounter effect before cause. (Think Memento.)
Deeper, there's reverse causality, in which the effect happens before the cause.
If we write the events in a modular way, with loose causality, and structure the text so that no one can't predict the order of events, this gets exciting. The reader has multiple, equally plausible narratives. And without an external grasp of the history, plausibility may as well be reality. Narrative becomes impossibly problematic, and the story untrustworthy. We need narrative structure in our history, to understand ourselves, and without it, we're hopeless.
This is the structure I'm pursuing for Saltwater Dredge.
Of course, none of this makes it easier to visit the past, body and all.
None of it brings Pat back.
Dramatic Irony: Next Levels
Your experience as a standard reader:
Fig. A: Wetu.Toward the end of Pat's rendition of Weetamoo's diary, the sachem-to-be is finally called for her adulthood rite. The year is 1654. She's been anticipating it most of the book; she'll spend several days and nights in a sweatlodge, tending a fire and waiting for contact from the nonmaterial world. In her two visions, a deer she'd unceremoniously killed leads her through the winter night to an important fishing area to the Pocasset, downstream from a waterfall. The second night, the deer leads her to an important fishing area, downstream from a waterfall, where she encounters older versions of herself with Metacom, her sister, and child. Metacom is painting bloodroot on their faces. She wonders why Wamsutta is missing. When she emerges from her vision, the fire in her wetu is almost out. The elders tell her later that most of her responsibility in this initiation was "to keep the fire going."
Your experience as a reader with a dash of history:
Weetamoo is peering into a future. The year is probably early-mid 1675. She's married several men, most recently Wamsutta, who has been poisoned by foot-stomping Pilgrims. Metacom has been gathering indigenous forces against the English, and is now leaning on his sister-in-law to fold her Pocassets into his army, which she will. She will also drown, crossing the Taunton River, a year later.
Let's look at this structurally.
In standard-issue dramatic irony, the reader knows something the characters don't. It creates an inimitable tension, which keeps you turning those pages. It's such the standard of story-telling in Hollywood you might notice its absence more clearly: think of how behind the plot you feel watching The Big Lebowski or Burn After Reading. What an easier ride these stories are the second time around.
Fig. B: The multiverse giveth; the Multiverse taketh away.With historical stories, you get something else, which Pat's working subtly. Here, the reader, before the story, knows what's coming. Let's call this Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. The text refers to a point in history – which to the speaker, is unknowably in the future – which the reader is already familiar with. The reader becomes a time-traveler.
There's another model we can tease from this: the text can present events out of sequence, creating a pseudo- Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. You encounter effect before cause. (Think Memento.)
Deeper, there's reverse causality, in which the effect happens before the cause.
If we write the events in a modular way, with loose causality, and structure the text so that no one can't predict the order of events, this gets exciting. The reader has multiple, equally plausible narratives. And without an external grasp of the history, plausibility may as well be reality. Narrative becomes impossibly problematic, and the story untrustworthy. We need narrative structure in our history, to understand ourselves, and without it, we're hopeless.
This is the structure I'm pursuing for Saltwater Dredge.
Of course, none of this makes it easier to visit the past, body and all.
None of it brings Pat back.
Fig. A: Wetu.Toward the end of Pat's rendition of Weetamoo's diary, the sachem-to-be is finally called for her adulthood rite. The year is 1654. She's been anticipating it most of the book; she'll spend several days and nights in a sweatlodge, tending a fire and waiting for contact from the nonmaterial world. In her two visions, a deer she'd unceremoniously killed leads her through the winter night to an important fishing area to the Pocasset, downstream from a waterfall. The second night, the deer leads her to an important fishing area, downstream from a waterfall, where she encounters older versions of herself with Metacom, her sister, and child. Metacom is painting bloodroot on their faces. She wonders why Wamsutta is missing. When she emerges from her vision, the fire in her wetu is almost out. The elders tell her later that most of her responsibility in this initiation was "to keep the fire going."Your experience as a reader with a dash of history:
Weetamoo is peering into a future. The year is probably early-mid 1675. She's married several men, most recently Wamsutta, who has been poisoned by foot-stomping Pilgrims. Metacom has been gathering indigenous forces against the English, and is now leaning on his sister-in-law to fold her Pocassets into his army, which she will. She will also drown, crossing the Taunton River, a year later.
Let's look at this structurally.
In standard-issue dramatic irony, the reader knows something the characters don't. It creates an inimitable tension, which keeps you turning those pages. It's such the standard of story-telling in Hollywood you might notice its absence more clearly: think of how behind the plot you feel watching The Big Lebowski or Burn After Reading. What an easier ride these stories are the second time around.
Fig. B: The multiverse giveth; the Multiverse taketh away.With historical stories, you get something else, which Pat's working subtly. Here, the reader, before the story, knows what's coming. Let's call this Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. The text refers to a point in history – which to the speaker, is unknowably in the future – which the reader is already familiar with. The reader becomes a time-traveler.
There's another model we can tease from this: the text can present events out of sequence, creating a pseudo- Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. You encounter effect before cause. (Think Memento.)
Deeper, there's reverse causality, in which the effect happens before the cause.
If we write the events in a modular way, with loose causality, and structure the text so that no one can't predict the order of events, this gets exciting. The reader has multiple, equally plausible narratives. And without an external grasp of the history, plausibility may as well be reality. Narrative becomes impossibly problematic, and the story untrustworthy. We need narrative structure in our history, to understand ourselves, and without it, we're hopeless.
This is the structure I'm pursuing for Saltwater Dredge.
Of course, none of this makes it easier to visit the past, body and all.
None of it brings Pat back.
January 16, 2011
Oh, Yeah… Slavery
Sometimes I jumpstart new areas of interest in this book by googling general history. Links daisychain, and soon, BAM. A cornerstone of the story. Today's lesson is no less dramatic than other discoveries (Metacom's War; the project's origins): let's start talking about Northern slavery.
This article on Boston.com (from September of last year) makes a good starting place. I'm so far from an expert the article caught me by surprise, both for its content and my ignorance. So I don't expect this post to serve for more than a point of origin. That said, there are several interesting things going on in Latour's piece, and for my money, a lot of it revolves around Joanne Pope Melish, author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England, 1780-1860 . First, there's this doozy:
It gets still more interesting for me, as Reservoir Dredge zeroes on the period just preceding the Civil War, and ends not long after reconstruction. And Melish also offers this:
This article on Boston.com (from September of last year) makes a good starting place. I'm so far from an expert the article caught me by surprise, both for its content and my ignorance. So I don't expect this post to serve for more than a point of origin. That said, there are several interesting things going on in Latour's piece, and for my money, a lot of it revolves around Joanne Pope Melish, author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England, 1780-1860 . First, there's this doozy:
The absolute amnesia about slavery here on the one hand, and the gradualness of slavery ending on the other, work together to make race a very distinctive thing in New England.Okay, sure. When I see "history" and "amnesia" in proximity, I go electric. Obviously there's no joy discovering more covert moral black holes, but it's hard not to be warmed by discovery itself, and the hope that new awareness begets still newer awareness. I'm instantly curious, especially given Brookline's claim that almost half the town land was owned by slave owners. That's a different kind of proximity. If Brookline (now a considerably more blue collar city than my Wellesley) is slavery-stained, one can but imagine what West Needham's silent involvement might have been.
It gets still more interesting for me, as Reservoir Dredge zeroes on the period just preceding the Civil War, and ends not long after reconstruction. And Melish also offers this:
What is conveniently forgotten is the number of people making a living snagging free black people in a dark alley and shipping them south.What?! People from my area made a living miniaturizing the slave trade, in the spaces behind their apartment buildings. Maybe that last bit is embellishment, but a reasonable one given Melish's description. I'll be picking up her book.
January 14, 2011
Freshwater Spring
Good news, Dredge fans. I'm trying to clear as much stuff as I can before packing my car and setting my sights northeast. I also don't expect a cheap drive.
What that means for you: discounted copies of the original, high-production-value printing of Freshwater Dredge. I'll have 30 copies available in a few weeks, for less than the original $12 tag. Five pieces (four pictured above): codex, dust jacket, title page & ephemera, envelope and special surprise. Each copy numbered from the original printing, signed and dated.
Please help me place them in good homes. Now's the best time to get ahold of the first section the cycle, likely to become a collector's item if this book ever takes off. And if you've already got one, I've been assured they make great gifts. The link will be up in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for reports from Taos this weekend.
January 11, 2011
One at a Time, Please
This weekend I decided to make the sister the only speaker in Tributary Dredge. She's certainly worth her own section, and it'll be really exciting to see where she goes with it. Four interesting consequences from this one simple change:
The middle brother's poems currently slated for Tributary will have to be massaged into Freshwater, and Freshwater itself will have to change some to accept them. Maybe this will involve more event-based connections with Wellwater, too. Exciting.Only one speaker in Tributary will make a much less confusing experience for the reader. I've been wondering a few days now if the book's too complex to be enjoyable. Hopefully this'll side-step some potential readability problems.This will better tie the three sections together in narrative, as well as theme. Exciting again.Tributary will expand with her perspective.
Small changes everything.This last point is really important. Right now, Tributary is essentially one 12-part story. Structurally distinct from its sibling sections, but that also makes it contingent on them, which subordinates it. The story builds on and answers some questions from Wellwater, while prying open others. Groovy.
But for the moment, it's not letting the sister speak with the same freedom her brothers do. The brothers speak both broad and specific about loss, longing, love, mystery, spirituality, and on – both in narratives broken into interdependent poems and stand-alone poems. Tributary's missing the stand-alones. I'm sure the sister has all kinds of statements, reflections, questions, and other output that doesn't appear in that 12-part narrative. The absence of those other kinds of observations hurts the book as a whole.
I think that's a fault of the storyteller, not the speaker. I'll know I've reached Tributary's identity when, like its speaker, the text is patterned with stories that point to different things, and in different ways.
Also, if I want to excerpt from Tributary, I'll need poems that can stand on their own. Imagine opening a novel to page 200 with a nameless speaker and references to characters you're supposed to have met. That's a hard sell to a magazine editor.
Like this here, from
Right of Inspection
. I mean, Why's she pissed?
Is she? And where the hell is she? Is this even legal? Context!
So let's recap: a book not aggressively hard-to-follow is a book more likely to successfully tell its story. I hope like Right of Inspection, my book is giving just enough help to tease the reader to read again, again. And that somewhere in that process, events begin connecting, and the world I've been visiting these last five years starts to sound, look, and touch as real for you, too.
The middle brother's poems currently slated for Tributary will have to be massaged into Freshwater, and Freshwater itself will have to change some to accept them. Maybe this will involve more event-based connections with Wellwater, too. Exciting.Only one speaker in Tributary will make a much less confusing experience for the reader. I've been wondering a few days now if the book's too complex to be enjoyable. Hopefully this'll side-step some potential readability problems.This will better tie the three sections together in narrative, as well as theme. Exciting again.Tributary will expand with her perspective.
Small changes everything.This last point is really important. Right now, Tributary is essentially one 12-part story. Structurally distinct from its sibling sections, but that also makes it contingent on them, which subordinates it. The story builds on and answers some questions from Wellwater, while prying open others. Groovy.But for the moment, it's not letting the sister speak with the same freedom her brothers do. The brothers speak both broad and specific about loss, longing, love, mystery, spirituality, and on – both in narratives broken into interdependent poems and stand-alone poems. Tributary's missing the stand-alones. I'm sure the sister has all kinds of statements, reflections, questions, and other output that doesn't appear in that 12-part narrative. The absence of those other kinds of observations hurts the book as a whole.
I think that's a fault of the storyteller, not the speaker. I'll know I've reached Tributary's identity when, like its speaker, the text is patterned with stories that point to different things, and in different ways.
Also, if I want to excerpt from Tributary, I'll need poems that can stand on their own. Imagine opening a novel to page 200 with a nameless speaker and references to characters you're supposed to have met. That's a hard sell to a magazine editor.
Like this here, from
Right of Inspection
. I mean, Why's she pissed?Is she? And where the hell is she? Is this even legal? Context!
So let's recap: a book not aggressively hard-to-follow is a book more likely to successfully tell its story. I hope like Right of Inspection, my book is giving just enough help to tease the reader to read again, again. And that somewhere in that process, events begin connecting, and the world I've been visiting these last five years starts to sound, look, and touch as real for you, too.
January 8, 2011
UPDATED: Meanwhile, Holy Shit
If you haven't heard about AZ Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D), she and six others, according to the county sheriff's office, were shot at a Tucson Safeway. The congresswoman was shot in the head while holding a constituency meet-and-greet.
If that shooter has anything to do with the Tea Party, someone
high
on the totem has to step up and stop these lunatics. Apparently not.
But it appears Sarah Palin has removed her infamous "Don't retweet, reload" message, but an assortment of other murky imagery is still making the rounds. The first bit of which reads like implicit guilt to me, the latter even more shameful. And here're Olbermann's comments, which as usual I find among the most sober:
But it appears Sarah Palin has removed her infamous "Don't retweet, reload" message, but an assortment of other murky imagery is still making the rounds. The first bit of which reads like implicit guilt to me, the latter even more shameful. And here're Olbermann's comments, which as usual I find among the most sober:
Seven Poems Planned
It's January 8, and I've written two of the seven poems I swore I'd have first drafts of by the end of December. Sounds like ahead of schedule to me.This latter one, though. It's from the middle-brother (Freshwater)'s perspective. I haven't written in his voice in a WHILE, and the last time I did, I didn't realize what distinguished his from mine, or from his siblings'. What characterizes him, as best I figure, is an airiness. Room for reflection, even as things are happening. Compared to his brother (Wellwater), who's clear but the metaphysical, he's very lyrical. Their sister is pretty straightforward. Of course, they all write about the same things, and many of the same issues underlie them.
This was a dream-poem. Or better said, a poem that starts in a dream, but focuses into some sort of dream-time travel. Yeah. Tributary's like that. So is Wellwater, but I know you don't have them in front of you, so I won't tease.
Instead, let's talk about taking planned art into production. I wrote out the plot-parameters of these poems as far back as November, so I could smooth the action a little more easily. And I spent a few months smoothing. Now, writing them, they're filling out in the most remarkable ways, mostly in their mystic qualities, and their images. But there's something else, too: motivation is appearing where I hadn't seen the need for it before. Pinning these floating narratives to sensory details is itself becoming kind of magical.
This seems different from planning an essay. Maybe more akin to sketching a painting. Visual artists, what's your process? This sound familiar?
January 5, 2011
Ah, Re-Beginning
As you may have noticed by now, Gourmet Book Design is now officially closed for renovations. This is the first step toward the new site, which will include this blog, so I'm stoked. And I'm really happy with the splash page, which took me, with limited but improving skills, about 4 days to design and code. What a relief I don't sell web design.
Anyway. Do me a quick favor: drop in and let me know what you think? It's gonna be a long, backache-addled journey, and I'd love all the encouragement I can scare up as I take my next steps up the mountain.
Anyway. Do me a quick favor: drop in and let me know what you think? It's gonna be a long, backache-addled journey, and I'd love all the encouragement I can scare up as I take my next steps up the mountain.
January 1, 2011
Redemption
Just now, reading
Sex at Dawn
in the Captain's Chair in the living room, I've had one of those Important Moments.
A few years back a friend asked if and how my writing redeems its dark premises. While I stared through the wall, he suggested "beauty" might do it. That answer always sounded like a copout. The words might dress the subject tenderly, but the subject remains dark, bitter, disturbing. Untransformed.
But all this talk of humans fighting and caging our sexuality by institutionalizing "pair bonding" – on top of making me randy as a sonofabitch – is revealing something fundamental. I've been worried this whole time* that I'm painting an unredeemable picture of Northeastern Americans. That we're worse than history-deniers: we devalue and ignore history until it seems to go away, and live on a hinge that swings only present-to-future. That an ultimate reading of The Dredge Cycle concludes, "It's only getting worse from here," or, in short, "We're fucked."
But today I'm officially adding to my hypothesis that the disturbing underbelly of the American historical consciousness has been created only by denying our nature. We're historical creatures. We have both the capacity and need for great memory; personal, cultural, and beyond. We crave it. The road to cultural health, and to justice, is paved in memory.
Redemption is not waiting in some subtle, unknowably or idealistic abstract answer to the book's questions. It's in accepting and loving another aspect of our nature. In reaching for old ways, learning the land's songs, figurative and literal. Wellwater and Tributary are all about this redemption, and I'd never noticed. (I'd explicate, but, you know, you don't have them in front of you yet.) Of course, yes, it's a complex road from there, but my book is a map of the question, and a small dot in the center reads the answer.
And know what else? I've long held that a holistic research approach to this project is the only way things truly move forward. I'm like the Dirk Gently of hometown historians. And there's nothing like confirmation of faith to combust oil into movement. Circularity, serendipity, or the long, impossibly curved arm of God, I trust you. And promiscuous sex. Apparently, I trust that, too.
Let's go, 2011. It's fuggin' on.
*Yeah, for real. 5 years of worry, lifted.
It's also worth mentioning that my dream this morning involved violent conflict, reconnaissance, packing for a move, and waking into another dream. A marker. A hard, muddy passage from one year into the next.
A few years back a friend asked if and how my writing redeems its dark premises. While I stared through the wall, he suggested "beauty" might do it. That answer always sounded like a copout. The words might dress the subject tenderly, but the subject remains dark, bitter, disturbing. Untransformed.
But all this talk of humans fighting and caging our sexuality by institutionalizing "pair bonding" – on top of making me randy as a sonofabitch – is revealing something fundamental. I've been worried this whole time* that I'm painting an unredeemable picture of Northeastern Americans. That we're worse than history-deniers: we devalue and ignore history until it seems to go away, and live on a hinge that swings only present-to-future. That an ultimate reading of The Dredge Cycle concludes, "It's only getting worse from here," or, in short, "We're fucked."
But today I'm officially adding to my hypothesis that the disturbing underbelly of the American historical consciousness has been created only by denying our nature. We're historical creatures. We have both the capacity and need for great memory; personal, cultural, and beyond. We crave it. The road to cultural health, and to justice, is paved in memory.
Redemption is not waiting in some subtle, unknowably or idealistic abstract answer to the book's questions. It's in accepting and loving another aspect of our nature. In reaching for old ways, learning the land's songs, figurative and literal. Wellwater and Tributary are all about this redemption, and I'd never noticed. (I'd explicate, but, you know, you don't have them in front of you yet.) Of course, yes, it's a complex road from there, but my book is a map of the question, and a small dot in the center reads the answer.
And know what else? I've long held that a holistic research approach to this project is the only way things truly move forward. I'm like the Dirk Gently of hometown historians. And there's nothing like confirmation of faith to combust oil into movement. Circularity, serendipity, or the long, impossibly curved arm of God, I trust you. And promiscuous sex. Apparently, I trust that, too.
Let's go, 2011. It's fuggin' on.
*Yeah, for real. 5 years of worry, lifted.
It's also worth mentioning that my dream this morning involved violent conflict, reconnaissance, packing for a move, and waking into another dream. A marker. A hard, muddy passage from one year into the next.
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