Katherine Addison's Blog, page 44

Addendum to review of The Maul and the Pear Tree (P. D. James & T. A. Critchley)

[original review, along with The London Monster (Bondeson) and The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (Jakubowski & Braund, eds.)]
[Goodreads (review & addendum)]


Having reread The Maul & the Pear Tree for what I think is at least the third time, I can offer a better explanation of why I don't believe James & Critchley. When you read carefully and attentively, it becomes painfully clear how much of their theory about the murders is based on pure, airy speculation. Their argument is full of scaffolding: "probably," "there is little doubt," "there is no reason to suppose," "may well have been," "it is virtually certain." They present many of their hypotheses as rhetorical questions, which--by assuming the reader's answer--make it easier for the hypothesis to pass as fact. And they treat a number of their speculations as if they are, in fact, proved rather than merely proffered.

When you clear away all the rhetoric, their theory (William Ablass and a confederate who was possibly Cornelius Hart) isn't really any more plausible than the theory that Williams was the sole killer. (Saying that your chosen murderer is a "psychopath" only pushes the problem of motive one tier back: if he's a "psychopath," by which you mean a person who kills indiscriminately and without motive, why are these the only two brutal butchering murders he's committed?)

Crime solving, like criminological historiography (i.e., true crime writing), and like both prosecution and defense in the American judicial system, is trying to find a story--a narrative linked together by cause and effect and strong enough to hold up when inspected by both common sense and fault-finding scrutiny--that will fit the facts. The more facts you can incorporate, the stronger your story will be. The Ratcliffe Highway murders resist narrative--the only way to make a story out of them is to follow De Quincey and assume that Williams was a sort of Iago-like villain, doing evil simply because he could. (Or follow James & Critchley and assume Ablass as our Iago.) And even that isn't really satisfactory.

Stripped down, the problems of the Ratcliffe Highway murders go like this:

1. The evidence available at this remove is spotty at best, so any theory you present is going to be tentative and full of hypotheticals:
(a.) Our forensic evidence is based on the observations made and recorded by untrained observers (not necessarily even doctors) in December 1811. QED.
(b.) The rest of the evidence is eyewitness testimony and hearsay. James & Critchley were writing before the UTTER USELESSNESS of eyewitness testimony had been demonstrated, but as a reader in 2016, I have to admit that most of what we've got is either inadmissible or would be torn to shreds by any defense attorney whose law degree was worth the paper it was written on.

2. The murderer or murderers butchered the entire Marr household (Timothy Marr, his wife Celia, his apprentice James Gowan, and the 3 month old Timothy, Jr.--sparing the servant Margaret Jewell because she had been sent to buy oysters) on the night of December 7 and John Williamson (yes, the alleged murderer is John Williams, and one of his victims is John Williamson--real life gets to be confusing like that), his wife Elizabeth, and their servant Bridget Harrington (sparing the Willliamsons' granddaughter Kitty Stillwell and their lodger John Turner, who were lucky enough to be in their bedrooms abovestairs) on the night of December 19. Nobody before and nobody after. Why the Marrs? why the Williamsons? There is evidence that strongly suggests both households were reconnoitered before the attack (in the Marrs' case, if Hart was in on the job, possibly for as much as a week), so they're not just random crimes of opportunity. James & Critchley try to show why Ablass might have had a grudge against Williams, and they try a little sub rosa substitutive rhetoric to make it look like the grudge against Williams could be translated to a grudge against Marr, but they can't suggest a motive for murdering the Williamsons. So if the murderer was "sane," what motive did he have, not just for the murders, but for the overkill involved--literally in the case of the Marrs' baby? And if he was ".insane," a "psychopath," why are these the only two killing sprees he went on?

3. Some of the evidence against Williams was clearly manufactured by the grudge-holding John Harrison (the entire story of the French knife is as full of holes as a chain-link fence), but that only means that some of our evidence is beyond untrustworthy into outright falsity--but we don't know which evidence. Some of Harrison's testimony? All of Harrison's testimony? How about the other lodgers? What about the terrified and equivocating landlady, Mrs. Vermilloe? At what remove from Harrison can we start trusting that our witnesses are doing their best to tell the truth?

4. Real life murders can never be made into a clean narrative. There are always inconsistencies, gaps in the timeline, demonstrable facts that make no sense. I find that I can't judge, in this case, which facts have to be incorporated into the narrative and which facts can be dismissed as bogeys, sundogs, and (to quote my favorite X-Files episode) the planet Venus. Because all of the facts look crazy.

To my knowledge, nobody has written about the Ratcliffe Highway murders since James & Critchley. If I were a true crime writer, I would take that challenge.

UBC: Andrew Cook, Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper by Andrew Cook

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



For someone who sneers at Ripperologists for bending facts to suit their crazy pet theories, this is a guy with a crazy pet theory and no compunction whatsoever about bending facts. He won't even use one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous quotes correctly:

Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proffered on a number of occasions that the process of elimination was the most effective way to shed light on a conundrum. When you have progressively eliminated, piece by piece, the impossible and the improbable, whatever you have left is likely to lead towards an answer. (Cook 161)

How the quote actually goes is, of course:

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (Doyle, The Sign of the Four, Chapter 6, emphasis in original)

Cook has in fact reversed the meaning: Holmes specifically and emphatically tells Watson that you have to accept the improbable, not eliminate it. This does not suit Cook's argument, since he's claiming it's too improbable that all, or even most, of the Whitechapel victims were killed by the same man (and therefore there's one "psychopath" and an undetermined number of "copy-cat killings" (Cook 199), because apparently the only reason people haven't been going around disembowelling prostitutes left and right is because they hadn't realized they could get away with it until the Ripper showed them how--and that's not improbable in the least). So he paraphrases and misrepresents, "twist[ing] facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts" (Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia"). And this run-in with Sherlock Holmes unfortunately serves as an accurate metonymy for the book as a whole.

Cook uses evidence badly and very selectively, claims things are evidence that aren't, presents as strokes of genius ideas that are common fare in the better class of Jack the Ripper books. He speculates egregiously. His source citations are pretty much useless, and he almost never bothers to cite his secondary sources at all. And he infuriates me by citing Victorian doctors' ideas about "lunatics" as if they have any relation whatsoever to the current understanding of mental illness. (Hint: no.) His authority on psychopathology is a book published in 1941.

But what irks me most about this book is that there's an actual interesting and important idea buried in all the nonsense. Cook argues (almost certainly following someone else, although I don't know who) that the Dear Boss letter and postcard were a hoax perpetrated by the Star in order to boost sales. He even supplies evidence to suggest that the actual writer was a reporter named Frederick Best. He certainly convinces me that the Star's editor, T. P. O'Connor, was exactly the sort of man who would think it was a splendid idea. And, of course, it was the Dear Boss letter that gave Jack the Ripper his name. I even agree that once you've postulated that "Jack the Ripper"--the idea of a single fiend in human form slashing his way through the fallen women of Whitechapel--was the creation of a couple of venal newspaper men, it's reasonable to go on and reassess the evidence of the murders to see what kind of pattern you get. But Cook does this reassessment excruciatingly badly, to the point that even when I agree with him, I reflexively disbelieve him. (I'm absolutely willing to entertain the idea that Elizabeth Stride doesn't belong in the sequence of Ripper murders--except when I'm told to by Andrew Cook.) And what he doesn't do is pay any attention to the genuine and attestable series of copy-cat crimes going on in the fall of 1888: the hoax letters to the police and the newspapers, all purporting to be from Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell is a fascinating book about those letters, and I would love to see more attention paid to them. A book seriously about copy-cat crimes (the psychology and the history and how many actual proven examples there are) and the letters (including the hoax--and were there letters to the police before the Dear Boss letter? I think there were, but I can't remember for sure) and whether you can apply the same idea to the Whitechapel murders would be awesome. This is really not that book.

I'm giving Jack the Ripper one star because there are those pieces of a good book buried in the bad rhetoric and bad argumentation supporting yet another crazy pet theory. But I don't recommend it.



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UBC: Steven M. Gillon, Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live

Lee Harvey Oswald: 48 Hours to Live: Oswald, Kennedy, and the Conspiracy that Will Not Die by Steven M. Gillon

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Unfortunately, this book reads like a cheap knock-off of Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin: trying to do the same thing for JFK's assassination that Sides did for MLK, but without either Sides' attention to detail or his ability to make all his disparate strands of narrative into something coherent.

I also admit, I got off on the wrong metaphorical foot with Gillon because he starts the book with an anecdote about Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy, Jr. (Castro tells JFK Jr. off the record that he, Castro, could never have allowed Oswald into Cuba), and he says in the endnote, "John, who was a close friend, shared this story with the author shortly after John's return from Cuba" (168). Anecdotes--leaving aside the New Historicist rhetorical maneuver of using an opening anecdote to give an essay thematic structure--are not evidence, and even if they were, this one isn't evidence of anything except that Castro, in 1997, still felt guilt and anxiety about JFK's death. Gillon has a wild hare that he chases--his speculation that Cuban intelligence agents working in the Cuban embassy in Mexico may have encouraged Oswald in his plan to kill Kennedy--which this anecdote ostensibly is (not) evidence for, but honestly, it feels like the point of the anecdote is in that endnote: "John, who was a close friend..."

And let's not even get me started on how pretentious it sounds, in a book published in 2013, to refer to yourself in the 3rd person as "the author."

So, yeah, Gillon rubbed me the wrong way, but that's not why I say this book isn't very good.

It isn't very good because it doesn't do what Hellhound on His Trail does. The narrative is surfacey and careless (was Oswald's rifle rolled in a blanket in his garage or in a carpet? Gillon switches in the space of a line (63); there are some awful malapropisms: "the Dallas police had set up no parameter and lax security around the jail" (60) (that's also not the only thing wrong with that sentence); Gillon makes gestures at tracking (as an example) Jacqueline Kennedy the same way Sides tracked Coretta Scott King, but he never follows through), and for a book that purports to be a timeline of the last 48 hours of Oswald's life, it's astonishingly bad at providing clear signposts about what happened when and in what order.

I don't actually know a great deal about the Kennedy assassination, beyond what "everybody knows," so I can't judge how well Gillon does at addressing all of the facts, or whether his debunking of various conspiracy theories holds water itself. I do appreciate the fact that the debunking is there.

The book left me with an untidy, dissatisfied feeling. Granted, its subject matter is untidy and dissatisfying--but an incoherent subject does not automatically result in an incoherent book, and really, the more incoherent the subject, the harder the writer should be trying--not to make the subject coherent, but to make his/her own project coherent. I've used The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York and The Murder of Helen Jewett as a compare-and-contrast pair, and this book pairs with Hellhound on His Trail in the same way. The gap between them is the gap where good historiography does or does not happen.



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technically not UBC, since I've read it before: Kleiger, The Trial of Levi Weeks

The Trial of Levi Weeks: Or the Manhattan Well Mystery by Estelle Fox Kleiger

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is not a great book. Kleiger is good at pointing out inconsistencies in the testimony, but her writing style is flat and unengaging and she has no particular thesis. If you are going to have great wads of 18/19th century trial transcripts in your text, you need to have something to offset them, and Kleiger doesn't.

Gulielma Sands (guessing from various misspellings, her name was pronounced Julie-Elma--or, given how frequently her nickname Elma is transcribed as Elmore, Julie-Elmer) is yet another in the sad sisterhood of Helen Jewett, Sarah Maria Cornell, Grace Brown, and--I strongly suspect--Mary Cecilia Rogers: the women whose murders fall into the category I have flippantly labeled why buy the cow? Chester Gillette was executed, but Richard Robinson, Ephraim Avery, and Levi Weeks (leaving aside the mysterious murderer of Mary Rogers, who got clean away) were all acquitted, despite the evidence against them. (Crucially, I think, Gillette was only marginally of a higher class than Brown and had very little social capital to cash in, whereas Robinson, Avery, and Weeks were all much better connected than their unfortunate victims.)

Weeks' trial is notable for, aside from the wretched job done by the prosecution, the fact that his lawyers were Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, four years before Burr killed Hamilton in a duel. Burr and Hamilton bring all their rhetorical cannons to the task of persuading the jury that (1) Gulielma Sands was a young woman of ill morals and melancholic disposition, probably conducting an affair with her uncle; that even if, refusing to be distracted by the uncle, you think you need to inquire into her death anyway, (2) she killed herself (by beating herself up and throwing herself in a well); that even if you are so ill-bred as to insist that she was murdered, (3) their client is a young man of sterling reputation, about whom no one has ever said a disparaging word; that even if you are not convinced that that means he can't have murdered the young lady, (4) he has an alibi (supported by his brother! How can you doubt?); that even if you are skeptical of the alibi, (5) the witnesses for the prosecution are all lying or confused or just plain wrong, and most of their evidence is immaterial anyway (even if there was a horse, which learned counsel take leave to doubt, it certainly can't be proved that it was a horse belonging to Levi Weeks' brother--that same brother who is providing the alibi); and even if you persist in questioning Levi Weeks' innocence, (6) no one can prove Gulielma Sands left her house in his company; and (7) [triumphantly] therefore no one can prove he murdered her!

(Our definition of "prove" here is very very narrow, since on the evening that--Sands had confided to her aunt and cousin--Weeks was going to take her to be secretly married, shortly after Sands had gone upstairs to get ready to leave the house, Weeks left the sitting room, whereupon Sands' aunt heard someone descend the stairs (from the upstairs location of Sands' bedroom), heard considerable whispering in the hall, and heard someone(s) leave. Thereafter, neither Weeks nor Sands were to be found in the house. But that doesn't prove anything.)

And because the Assistant Attorney General was about as much use as a tennis racquet is to a duck, it didn't prove anything. Weeks was acquitted--although he was pretty bluntly found guilty in popular opinion, which may have been the reason for his leaving New York: he ended up a successful architect in Natchez: Auburn, with its absolutely astonishing completely free-standing spiral staircase, is the brainchild of Levi Weeks.

Levi Weeks died young, at 43, but it's still a better ending than Gulielma Sands got.



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UBC: Hampton Sides, Hellhound on his Trail

Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History by Hampton Sides

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The thing I particularly admire about this book (beside the fact that it is both well-written and well-researched, proving that the two things can coexist in the same work), is the way that Sides follows so many different paths, both as they twist together toward the assassination and as they unravel in a dozen different directions after. The underlying backbone of the book is James Earl Ray's trajectory, but Sides also follows Martin Luther King, Jr.--both as a man and (horribly but necessarily) as a corpse--the inner circle of the SCLC's leadership and the dreadful collapse of the Poor People's Campaign (fifty years later and we still need Dr. King back--there has been no one like him, either before or since); Coretta Scott King; the garbagemen's strike in Memphis; the FBI, including their patient backtracking of every damn piece of Ray's matériel . . . Sides' prose is beautifully lucid and he approaches each of his subjects with the same patience, attention, and empathy. (Empathy. Not the same as sympathy. He has no sympathy for Ray at all, but he does his best to have empathy for him, even as that project becomes more and more self-evidently hopeless.)

Sides objects, in the afterword to the paperback edition, to his book being called a thriller--"it implies," he says, "that I've turned a national tragedy into an entertainment of sorts." The book is entertaining to read--in the sense that it keeps you engaged and actively interested--but it is not an "entertainment." What makes it compelling is the way Sides lays all the pieces of the assassination out, like the gears of a clock on a piece of black velvet, and patiently, one by one, explains how they worked. It's painfully compelling, both as historiography and as a lament for everything that Ray destroyed.



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(Thinking about) Thinking about Writing

[First published on Storytellers Unplugged, July 29, 2007; this is the only essay from Storytellers Unplugged that (a.) I could not somehow find online and (b.) I actually had a version of on my computer. Most of them, I typed straight into the compose window. I honestly have no idea if this version is word-for-word what actually went up, but it's the best we're gonna get.

[ Storytellers Unplugged is still active, btw. I just stopped being able to write even just one post a month for them sometime back in 2011.

[Here endeth the editor's aside. --Ed.]

This month, let's not talk about my book (although it does, btw, look like I'm going to meet my deadline after all). Instead, let's go all meta and think about the ways we think about writing.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a peculiar species in more ways than one, but one of our most endearing quirks is our ability to think about our own thought processes. We can do something; we can think about doing something; and we can think about thinking about doing something. It's fantastic!

And since 90%-99% of the writing process takes place in the mind anyway, it's inevitably something that is both frustrating and intensely rewarding to think about.

One of the first things I learned when I began reading books about creative writing (and even more so when I began hanging out with other writers) is that no two people understand their creativity in the same way. (This goes for other endeavors, too, not just writing; I'm sticking with what I know, but I'm not meaning to imply that writers have a corner on this particular market.) And the second thing I learned was that not all ways of thinking about creativity work for all people.

One person's muse, in other words, is another person's poison.

This inconvenient fact does not mean that anyone is "doing it wrong." The only way to tell if you're "doing it wrong" is if you're not writing. It doesn't matter whose advice you follow or don't follow, no matter how insistently a given guru may tell you that their way is the only way that will bring success. What matters is whether your creative process is actually, you know, processing. The rest is just bells and whistles.

It can be tremendously helpful, however, to get a feel for which ways of thinking about writing work for you, and which don't. Natalie Goldberg, for instance, does not work for me. I tried--my creative writing teacher in high school was a true acolyte of Natalie Goldberg and worshipped whole-heartedly at her altar--and I tried, and finally I admitted, This isn't me. This isn't how I understand what I do.

The world was conspicuous by its failure to end.

So I thought--over the course of a decade or so, and obviously, I'm still thinking--about how I think about writing. And I've learned a lot, both about myself and my writing process. And about how I think about writing.

And the insight has been valuable because there are points in the writing process where you need to be able to pull back to the meta level, to be able to look at what you're doing, not from inside the maze, where it's stifling and humid and there are mosquitos the size of sparrows, but from the observation tower in the middle, where you can see how the paths wind and twist, and where the dead-ends are, and how to get to the center from where you are.

As for example, writer's block.

Writer's block probably deserves an essay all its own, but my point here is that my success rate in dealing with it went up dramatically when I stopped looking at it from inside the maze, as a boulder sunk immovably in the middle of my way, and looked at it instead from outside the maze, where it resolves quite differently.

For me (and remember, everyone's creativity works differently, so this may or may not work for you), the key to undoing writer's block was shifting my focus from the immediate (What happens next? Where are they going? What do they want?) to the meta (Why am I stuck?). Because if I give myself enough time to work out the answer to Why am I stuck? it shows me how to get unstuck, and the answer may or may not have anything to do with the scene I'm currently stuck in. The reasons for my stuckness may be a wrong turn I took five scenes back.

So that's the first thing I know about how I think about writing. I need the meta level.

The second thing I know is something you will have observed in the preceding paragraphs: I think in metaphors. Lots of writers do. And the important thing here is that you have to choose your own metaphors. You have to go with what works, not with what pleases you. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, talks about listening to your broccoli as a metaphor for paying attention to your subconscious. I love this metaphor, but it does not work for me. Possibly because I don't like broccoli. But more because my metaphors tend to be metaphors of struggle--like trying to find my way through a maze. Or getting lost in Arthur Conan Doyle's Great Grimpen Mire. I think of the process Lamott describes as "listening to your broccoli" more as a siege. The parts of my mind that are not "I," that don't have direct access to language and don't have the benefits of all this self-reflection, have to beat down the walls to get "me" to listen to them. Sometimes, of course, the besieged is helping the besiegers, trying to pry the boards out of the windows and so on, but still. All my metaphors are metaphors of struggle; many of them are metaphors of violence.

And trying to deny that--trying to scrub my thought processes and tie bows on them so they're fit to meet the neighbors--results in nothing. The literal kind of nothing, in which no work gets done and my processes stagnate and I become a misery to my husband and cats.

That's the most important thing in all this thinking about thinking. You have to be honest with yourself.

Because if you don't, who will?

Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, December 29, 2007; thanks to the for helping me rescue it]

I’m up to my neck in revisions for Corambis, my fourth book. In fact, I may be in over my head.

2007 was the year I learned I can’t write a book in a year. Actually, that’s not quite true. I can write a book in a year. What I can’t do is write a good book. The first draft of Corambis was certainly a book. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it had characters and plot.

It had clichés.

I talked last month about genre conventions, and that post was a direct result of the thinking I’ve been doing about revising Corambis. Because apparently how my process works is that I write the draft with all the genre conventions in it, and then I write the draft where I take them all out again.

I would like, someday, to be able to skip straight to Step 2, but that hasn’t happened yet.

In my particular case, the genre conventions were there for what is actually, in fairness, a very good reason. They were providing plot structure. One reason to write about a scullery boy who turns out to be king is that that convention comes with a built in plot. You don’t have to worry about how to structure your story; the genre conventions do it for you.

This is very seductive, especially when you have a deadline. Especially when plot and structure are not your strong point and you know it.

But it comes back to bite you on the ass in the end, when you look at the book you’ve written and think, my god, this is cheap and trite and flimsy, and worst of all, it isn’t true.

The purpose of fiction is to tell the truth by lying. And genre conventions are part of the structure of lies, not part of the structure of truth. You need both structures, mind you; you can’t get to the truth unless your lies are strong and brave and beautiful. But genre conventions are lies within lies, lies about lies . . . lies about the way we tell lies in order to tell the truth.

“Beauty without cruelty, ever so much worse than untrue,” Kris Delmhorst says in one of her songs, and that’s my problem with genre conventions. They’re too easy. They say you can have beauty without cruelty; they say you can tell lies without worrying about the truth. And if I believe anything about storytelling, it’s that you have to care about the truth behind your lies.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some scullery boys to chase out of my plot.

The Wonderfulness of . . .

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, October 7, 2010]

While my ankle mends and I struggle with Restless Legs Syndrome (which, by the way, I do not recommend ), I’ve been watching I Spy on Hulu. I Spy, which ran from 1965 to 1968 and starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, is awesome, but its awesomeness is not actually what I want to talk about for this post.

There’s a curious phenomenon, you see, of mid-sixties spy shows. Because on the one hand you have I Spy, and on the other, you have The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968, starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum). (I’m not going to talk about Get Smart (1965-1970), because I haven’t seen any episodes since I was a small child, but it would be an interesting way to complete a trifecta.) Both shows, aside from their mid-60s runs and their stars named Robert, were conceived of as James Bond spoofs. Both feature an American agent (Culp, Vaughn) teamed with someone who is in some way an outsider to mainstream (i.e., white, middle-class) American culture: a Russian, an African-American–and I Spy does not hesitate to point out the prejudice Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby) fights against. Napoleon Solo (Vaughn) and Kelly Robinson (Culp) are very similar characters–a little feckless, very charming, easily ensnared by a pretty female face–just as there are a lot of similarities between Kuryakin (McCallum) and Scott: both are scholarly (Scotty was a Rhodes scholar, and Illya has a Ph.D. in Quantum Mechanics), both serve as straight men for their partners’ whimsical approach to life (although each gives as good as he gets in back-and-forth banter). And in both shows, the partnership between the two men is portrayed as the most important relationship in their lives, the single most important thing keeping them sane and able to function, the thing they will not and cannot betray. (Both shows have brainwashing episodes in which one partner is turned against the other. In both cases, the crux of the episode is the moment at which the brainwashing fails. Illya can’t kill Napoleon, just as Kelly fires at Scotty point-blank and misses.)

With all these similarities, you’d expect the shows to be very much alike, and yet they aren’t. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a very clair show (using “clair” here as the opposite of “noir”); it’s not a spoof in the sense that Get Smart (1965-1970) is, but it’s always very meta, very self-aware, and–especially after the first season, which dabbled in the shallow end of noir–very careful to keep itself divorced from the real world. U.N.C.L.E.’s main opponent is THRUSH, not any real world country (like, say, the USSR). Napoleon and Illya have no personal lives that we ever see; there are only the vaguest references to their families and backgrounds; they don’t take vacations. You can almost imagine Waverly putting them away in their boxes in between affairs. The stories The Man from U.N.C.L.E. wants to tell are about espionage in the abstract, about the tension between the ordinary world and the spies creeping about behind the wainscotting.

I Spy, on the other hand, is about espionage as the ordinary world. It was the first TV show to be shot on location (unlike The Man from U.N.C.L.E., in which all airports really do look the same), and the episodes make use of the settings of Hong Kong, Mexico City, Madrid. Kelly and Scotty live in hotel rooms, and the show remembers that they live in hotel rooms. They talk about vacations (well, they bitch and moan about the vacations they don’t get), they have to explain their expenses to government officials, they walk a constant tightrope between maintaining their cover (as a tennis bum and his trainer) and getting the job done. We don’t know much about Kelly’s family, but both Kelly and Scotty write to Scotty’s mom in Philadelphia (it’s Kelly’s best threat: “I’m going to write to your mother!”); the show is built on the detritus and impedimenta of their daily lives as spies. And they don’t fight THRUSH, either. They’re up against Chinese agents and Russian agents–and the occasional freelance madman. (I find it interesting that the Russian agents are frequently human and sympathetic, while the Chinese agents are, um, not.) Scotty can’t save the heroin addict because she doesn’t want to be saved. Being tortured has psychological consequences; one episode deals with what is, in essence, Kelly’s nervous breakdown, although all the characters are very, very careful never to say so out loud. If The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is what you get when you refuse to take James Bond seriously, I Spy is what happens when you think James Bond through. Kelly and Scotty are tired and cynical; they believe in the ideals they’re fighting for (the most dated moments are the knee-jerk rhetoric about the Evils of Communism), but they’re frequently dubious about the means they have to employ, and always aware that they’re nothing more than replaceable parts as far as the higher-ups at the Pentagon are concerned. Nothing could be more different than the personal relationship Napoleon and Illya have with their boss, Mr. Waverly.

My point here, aside from the wonderfulness of I Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., is that these two shows, despite their extensive similarities, are very different creatures. They have different thematic concerns; they go in different directions. And they provide a lovely example of the relative unimportance of originality. Because with the same basic premise and many of the same elements, they tell entirely different stories.

It’s a truism among doctoral candidates that as soon as you get your thesis topic approved, a well-known scholar in your field will publish a book on the same subject. (And it’s a truism because it happens. It happened to me with Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and Purgatory.) The important thing about this truism, though, is that after the moment of white-out panic in which your entire academic career passes before your eyes, it doesn’t matter. The originality of your research doesn’t depend on your topic, it depends on what you have to say about your topic. And the same is true with storytelling. It’s not the idea of a James Bond spoof that’s original; it’s the difference between Napoleon Solo and Kelly Robinson, between Illya Kuryakin and Alexander Scott. It’s not WHAT you do that matters. It’s how you do it.

What Not to Do with Writer's Block

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, September 29, 2007; thanks to the Wayback Machine for helping me rescue it]

So I said, back in July, that writer’s block probably deserved a post of its own. And since I’m having no luck coming up with a better topic for September (self-reflexively, I am experiencing a kind of writer’s block), let’s just run with it and see where we get.

The first thing not to do with writer’s block is reify it.

“Reify” is a fancy litcrit word, from the Latin res, and what it means is taking something–a social custom or an institutional practice or a way of thinking–and letting it turn into the black monolith from 2001. It becomes something you can’t change–can’t even think about changing–because you’re forgetting that it has origins and purposes and all those other things that human artifacts, whether material or mental, have. Writer’s block isn’t an unfathomable object. It’s kind of mysterious, because it’s a conflict between the conscious mind and what I tend to call the underconscious, but giving into the mystification angle, letting it become a reified thing, merely makes it harder to deal with. Eventually, it leads to pulling an Ernest Hemingway and blowing your head off.

Bad idea.

The second thing not to do with writer’s block is to use it as an excuse.

There is a perfectly legitimate point in the process of moving from unblocked to blocked to unblocked again where trying to write is only going to make things worse, and you do have to recognize and respect that, but it’s all too easy to start saying I have writer’s block, when the real problem is that you’re struggling with a craft issue, or you’ve made some horrible mistake that you don’t know how to fix, or you’re bored with the story you’ve been working on, or, hell, you just feel lazy today and don’t want to work. Or all of the above. “Writer’s block” sounds a lot better than any of those things, and there’s always the possibility that it can be milked for drama and sympathy.

… Another bad idea.

Writing is hard work, and I don’t think there’s a writer on the face of the planet–or beneath the face of the planet, if there are Morlocks down there writing poems and stories and recipes for baked Eloi–who doesn’t have days when she just wants to QUIT already and go dig ditches for a living or something. At least, if there is a writer out there who never has that sort of day, I’m not sure I want to meet him. But any human endeavor is like that, unromantic and sweaty and hard damn work, and if you don’t want to do the work, it’s better to just admit you don’t want to do the work, whether that’s for a day or a week or whether really you ARE quitting and where’s the nearest ditch-digger school? Prettying it up by calling it writer’s block doesn’t do anyone any favors in the long run.

And the third thing not to do with writer’s block is to give into it.

No, Virginia, it isn’t going to go away on its own.

One of the hardest steps in going from a dilettante writer to a serious writer, and then to a professional writer is learning to generate inspiration. The lightning bolt from the blue is all very well, but it isn’t reliable, and if you want to make a career out of writing, you cannot sit around waiting for the lightning to find you. You have to get behind the mule in the morning, as the Tom Waits song says, and you have to do it whether you’re inspired or not. When you’re blocked, that means you have to go look at what’s blocking you, see if you can crawl under it, or climb over it, or squeeze around it on the left, or hack a chunk out of it on the right. And if it throws you off, you have to jump right back in. You have to make the block explain itself to you, and then you have to take it apart and keep walking.

Writer’s block can stop you from writing, but you cannot let it stop you from working. And that’s the most important thing not to do with writer’s block.

Verisimilitude; Plus, a Sestina

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, August 7, 2010]

Last Sunday afternoon, I broke my ankle. (Posts with details here and here.) Obviously, I’ve spent most of my time since then stoned on first Percocet and then Oxycodone, so it’s good that the accident itself has given me a topic for a post–namely verisimilitude versus what my partner-in-crime, Elizabeth Bear, calls second order cliches. (I would never use another person’s broken ankle as fuel for my creativity, but using my own broken ankle is not merely thrifty, it gives me something to think about, which has been essential at more than one point recently.)

The accident occurred as I was walking across a slight grassy slope with a couple of other people, toward a barn in which people and horses were warming up for a Training level dressage test. (Yes, the irony is mighty. I was at a horse show and my broken bone has nothing whatsoever to do with horses.) I slipped.

I can’t reconstruct exactly what happened. I think that my right foot must have skidded out from under me from right to left (also downhill), but honestly, I can’t say for sure. I don’t remember that part. I do remember hearing my ankle break and knowing immediately and absolutely what it was. It was a wet, tight snap. It did not sound like a gunshot or a snapping branch or any of the other second order cliches that people use in stories. It sounded like a bone breaking.

The people with me were convinced I must have hit my head. That’s what my ankle breaking sounded like to them, like my head hitting a rock.

One of the people watching the warm-up was a person who had training for dealing with this sort of situation (and believe me, I am grateful to him beyond the telling of it). He said he heard my ankle break from the barn, a good twenty or thirty feet away. He knew immediately what it was, too.

Second order cliches are pernicious; they’re ruts in our use of English. (I have a terrible time with them, as Bear can testify.) In this specific case, they’re also misdirection: they obscure the truth not merely with the sort of soft cloud of familiarity they draw between reader (and writer) and story, but also by comparisons that change the nature of the event they describe. I’ve been thinking about this all week, while stoned on painkillers, and it has turned itself into a sestina. Apparently, Percocet makes blank verse easy. Certainly, it does make one’s thoughts turn back on themselves in ways that make sestinas inevitable.

Percocet Sestina

Untrue, the story: when you break a bone,
The sound is like a twig or rifle shot.
But it isn’t. It’s a stingy sound
And mean. Unmistakable, inside
At least. I knew the bone was broken truth
Before I hit the ground. Before the pain.

It’s good, that story. It says that when the pain
Comes down, it will not be your real bone,
But a twig, a bullet, anything but the truth
That you yourself are not the bullet shot
But, quivering, the doe rabbit, torn inside
And rent, every breath a sobbing sound.

Not a story, not a twig (the sound
Clean and dry, free of strength or pain).
You are not a twig, not dead inside.
You are meat and blood and broken bone,
And if you could escape, like a shot,
You’d run to story, leave behind the truth.

Stories–twigs and rifles–hurt less than truth:
The suddenness, the slip, the fall, the sound,
Not crisp like twigs, not distant like a shot,
But wet and all too close and thick with pain.
It is no safe-soft story, but your bone;
It breaks within your private story, inside

The border lines policed and watched, inside
The place where stories spin and toil, where truth
Is made. In this place, it’s not just bone
That breaks. The sound–the snap–is more than sound;
It tells your helpless imperfection, the pain
To come. It would be easier to be shot,

To end the story by firing squad: the shot
Like punctuation, nothing left inside–
No embarrassment, no circling pain–
But that’s a story, not the needed truth.
We know truth by the sound it makes, the sound,
Wet and sharp and cruel, of breaking bone.

ENVOY
The breaking bone, the petty sound of truth,
No shot, no story–not inside. But pain.