Kip Manley's Blog, page 45

Things to keep in mind (The secret of style)

Novelization Style combines strict, unvaried close third person point of view with transparent prose. It feels like an attempt to render in prose the feeling of a scene filmed by a camera, creating an illusion of objectivity. The result is a standardized generic narrative voice, and what feels like a denial that the story is being narrated at all. Novelization Style is mostly paced moment-to-moment, again like a scene playing out on video; in some books section breaks echo the way a movie or TV show cuts between scenes. Novelization Style prioritizes action over interiority. Descriptions are brief and concrete instead of evocative; dialogue is plot-relevant; function trumps form. When it comes to plotting, bigger is better; generally at some point we learn about a conspiracy or pending disaster that will cost lives. Raising the stakes means making the threat bigger, not the emotional arc more intense or the intellectual and philosophical questions more urgent. Novelization Style sometimes uses recognizable Hollywood storytelling patterns, like the prologues and wrap-ups I described in the last post, or an apparent divide between “speaking roles” and “extras.”

—Wesley Osam

Five by five

The story continues; ah, well.

Things to keep in mind (The secret of putting out)

Deep acting, like embodied witnessing, involves “loving care.” Hochschild quotes a recent graduate of Delta’s training program, which asked flight attendants to imagine each passenger as a “personal guest in your living room”:

You think how the new person resembles someone you know. You see your sister’s eyes in someone sitting at that seat. That makes you want to put out for them.

The “putting out” expected of flight attendants is different from that required of exotic dancers, but the acting methods are similar. You try to imagine what it would be like to care about the man seated in front of you, pretend a sense of intimacy, and over time you feel as though you feel care and intimacy. In her study of Madison, Wisconsin, escorts, Kirsten Pullen notes that “Deep acting allows sex workers to reframe the sometimes degrading and often discomforting commercial exchange as pleasant or even ennobling.” While this strategy may have helped me reconcile my ambivalent feelings about performing erotic labor and rewrite some of the more uncomfortable aspects of my experience, it has somewhat destabilizing effects on my ability to reflect upon those feelings and experiences as a “researcher.” What does it mean that I felt loving care toward customers if that care was a tactic for increasing profit? Given who I am now—a stodgy, minivan-driving mother of two young boys—how can I recall experiences perceived when I was someone else entirely? If everyone was acting—my customers, my managers, my coworkers, myself—how can I trust my own voice?

—Jessica Berson

Things to keep in mind (The secret of poetry)

At first, I didn’t want to be a novelist—I wanted to be a poet. And I was a poet: I had already published poetry, and I had respect as a poet. I had readers, reviewers, and people liked me as a poet. I was considered a first-class poet. And I knew that if I was also a novelist, I was going to lose my glamour. But it’s also more than that, because there’s something sacred in the figure of a poet: The poet doesn’t get stained by the kind of labor that a novel implies. Being a poet is another thing.

I hid my first novel, a very violent novel about children; I hid it in the deepest corner of a drawer. And then I wrote a second one, on children too. Then I knew I was doomed. I was a novelist, and I had to publish the first one. After writing my second novel, I wrote a third novel, also about children. I wanted to do another one, but it was no longer need but desire. I needed to write the first ones; with the fourth and fifth ones, it was more the joy of telling a story. And I did not want to repeat the same book, out of respect for what a novel is and out of love for my profession. The idea of making one book similar to the other one seemed dishonest. So I needed a different space. I started looking for a different setting, because that would force me to write a different book. And I was right: The setting forced me to another form, another attitude toward language, another treatment of the characters. But with my same obsessions.

I have these obsessions that I don’t know how to name. But they gnaw at me. And they eat me alive if I’m not writing. So I write.

—Carmen Boullosa

Things to keep in mind (The secret of storytelling)

They tell you you’re supposed to do that; that’s what you should do. I think what music can offer is the feeling of forward motion, also the feeling of accumulation of information, of sensations, of feelings, like we’re going somewhere. When I say “feel like,” I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not real, but that it’s the work of the imagination, which is what narrative is.

We can create the sensation of community through the accrual of actions, and that’s often the clichéd way that it’s talked about, as someone taking a solo—Sonny Rollins taking a solo, having his motific development as formal logic—and that’s great for lots of reasons. But I don’t really like to feel like I’m forced to listen to it in a certain way, or that there is one master reading of performance. I think what we want from performance is multiplicity, which is lots of ways in and through it, because it’s for lots of people, and it was created by lots of people, often.

I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent—how does it add up?

What you want from performance, because we’re all in a room together, is that somehow we’ve gotten somewhere at the end, together. You could call that a sense of narrative, but it’s not so obvious how that happens. One way it happens is by everyone caring about it happening.

—Vijay Iyer

Things to keep in mind (The secret of elementalism)

Here is an audience sensitive to the sheer elements of the English language… Translate their playfulness and serious use of the sheer elements of language into the terms and understandings of a five-year-old and you have as intelligent an audience in rhythm and sound as the maddest poet’s heart could desire.

—Margaret Wise Brown

Things to keep in mind (The secret of integument)

But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women


    as sometimes at sunset


        the rosyfingered moon

surpasses all the stars. And her light


    stretches over salt sea


        equally and flowerdeep fields.

And the beautiful dew is poured out


    and roses bloom and frail


        chervil and flowering sweetclover.

96.7 “rosyfingered”: an adjective used habitually by Homer to designate the red look of Dawn. I think Sappho means to be startling, but I don’t know how startling, when she moves the epithet to a nocturnal sky. Also startling is the fecundity of sea, field and memory which appears to flow from this uncanny moon and fill the nightworld of the poem—swung from a thread of “as sometimes” in verse 7. Homer too liked to extend a simile this way, creating a parallel surface of such tangibility it rivals the main story for a minute. Homer is more concerned than Sappho to keep the borders of the two surfaces intact; epic arguably differs from lyric precisely in the way it manages such rivalry.

—Anne Carson

Clear and unentailed

One tries not to lift the curtain here too much, but it’s not as if one doesn’t lift curtains. You might have to do a bit work to piece the one with the other, but I did speak with the delightful host of Cabbages & Kings, a podcast I commend to your attention, and the results of which are available for your listening pleasure. (There are also some footnotes.)

—Work proceeds apace on no. 27, “ – tends to crumble – ”, which, well, titles do have a way of doing what they do? —I feel the need to mention the Patreon at this juncture, if only because patrons have seen the images for the next few covers, and I’d hate for you to miss out if you haven’t.

Things to keep in mind (The secret of ishq)

Ishq makes us human. It makes us responsible and slightly better human beings than we were before. All lovers are not ideal humans, nor always nice, but the one who is in love does imagine a better world. When you are in love, you discover the many nooks and corners of the city. In some places, you hold hands as you walk. In others, you walk alongside but slightly far apart. Lovers want to transform the city into one of their imagination. The city of their memories is not one of Ghalib’s poetry. Woh sheher ko jaante bhi hai or jeete bhi hai. They know the city as well as live it. Within them, the spirit of all the seasons finds a resonance. Those who are not in love, they do not inhabit the city.

Jis tan ko chhooa tune us tan ko chhupaaoon


Jis man ko laage naina, woh kisko dikhaaoon


—Rudaali, 1993

We cannot even allow this feeling of love to express itself. Meera, you are from this country, aren’t you? Love makes us a little weak and circumspect. And if a human being is neither, he can turn into a monster. To love is not to just say “I love you.” To love is to know someone and, for that, one has to know oneself. It is the month of February, but don’t waste all your energies in hunting for a lover. Look for yourself, too, and your city. Hunt for those dreams, too, which you want fulfilled for someone else’s sake.

—Ravish Kumar

Things to keep in mind (The secret of streams)

The academics write in their paper that: “Studying characteristics of the sentence-length variability in a large corpus of world famous literary texts shows that an appealing and æsthetic optimum… involves self-similar, cascade-like alternations of various lengths of sentences.”

“An overwhelming majority of the studied texts simply obey such fractal attributes but especially spectacular in this respect are hypertext-like, ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novels. In addition, they appear to develop structures characteristic of irreducibly interwoven sets of fractals called multifractals.”

The other works most comparable to multifractals, the academics found, were A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar, The USA trilogy by John Dos Passos, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño and Joyce’s Ulysses. Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu showed “little correlation” to multifractality, however; nor did Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

The academics note that “fractality of a literary text will in practice never be as perfect as in the world of mathematics”, because a mathematical fractal can be magnified to infinite, while the number of sentences in a book are finite.

“It is not entirely clear whether stream-of-consciousness writing actually reveals the deeper qualities of our consciousness, or rather the imagination of the writers. It is hardly surprising that ascribing a work to a particular genre is, for whatever reason, sometimes subjective,” said Drożdż, suggesting that the scientists’ work “may someday help in a more objective assignment of books to one genre or another.”

—Alison Flood