Robyn Hugo McIntyre's Blog, page 8

Half a Decade? Oh, Please…

It’s a writer’s job to use words to give voice to emotion but I hate it when language is blatantly manipulated to inflate the mundane into the gasp-worthy. Example:

“…after all, it took nothing less than the pent-up rage of thousands and a fantastically dumb sound bite from Kenan Thompson to get Michaels to bring on Sasheer Zamata, SNL’s first black female cast member in over half a decade.” (Excerpt from this article.)

Five years. Leaving the subject of  the article out this, five years can be either very long or very short, depending on the context. But putting it in the frame of a decade automatically takes us to ten years, just as $1.99 makes us mentally round down to a dollar. It’s a trick and an obvious one used in service of the author’s argument, which was also a side rant to the real issue. In another writer’s hands, such treatment could be construed as ironic: Gee, a whole five years? Used with all seriousness, it just comes off as manipulative.

 

Tagged: emotion, irony, manipulation, rant, Saturday Night Live, SNL, Writing

Used to It

 

“Will you not come down to join the festival?”

Fanne did not turn from where her hand holding the quill moved across the paper. “Sorry, no.”

There was no sound of Leefer leaving.

“Why not?”

Fanne still did not turn. “I would not enjoy it. After greeting a few friends and having a glass of something, I would retreat to a corner and spend the rest of the evening watching. It’s more profitable for me to stay here and work.”

“But – “

Fanne continued to write.

“But there are folk to talk with and dancing… you like dancing.”

“Perhaps I’m not in the mood.”

“I don’t understand.” There was a quiver in Leefer’s voice that finally made Fanne stop writing and turn her head.

“Listen, Leefer. I like to help people, I want them to prosper. But as a group, I prefer to let them be. I never feel a part of them. At every celebration, some bit of me is always standing away and watching. It is a lonely feeling and I like to avoid it.”

“But they like you – “

“And often, I like them. but sometimes that is not enough.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not required you should.” Fanne turned back to her paper and re-dipped the quill, began writing once more. She paused as a hand fell gently upon one shoulder.

“Fanne, does that not staying apart feel lonely as well?”

One corner of Fanne’s mouth lifted, though Leefer could not see it. “Yes, sometimes it does. But I would sooner be lonely here than there. And I am used to it.”

“Used to it…” Leefer’s voice trailed away and the hand on her shoulder was removed.

Fanne continued to write as the thick door shut behind her, cutting off the sounds of celebration in the streets. The sudden silence was like a balm.

Tagged: festival, lonely, social, Writing

Maybe Your First Love…

Farm road through Champaign County – Wikimedia Commons

I forgot his name almost as soon as I heard it and there is probably no one now who could tell me what it is. The only things I really remember about him are that he had dark hair and he was a teacher. The car – it was a sedan, maybe foreign, but I don’t know what kind or remember what color. He drove us on the country highway for what seemed a long time, but possibly wasn’t. My mother told me later that he was the husband of someone she knew in college and it was a strange coincidence that led him to offer a ride to tall young woman and her four year old, half-Filipino daughter. He was animated and his voice smiled as he talked. I have no idea what they talked about, but somewhere along the drive, I fell in love with him.

We were hitchhiking to New York City from Los Angeles and we met him somewhere in the middle of the country. Then he had to turn off down another road from the main highway, so he left us at the crossroads and drove away past fields of growing things.  I did not want to leave him. Ever. I cried as I was lifted from the back seat and put on my feet on the dusty road. I cried even harder as his car receded into the distance and I have never forgot the feeling of connection and then loss.

There is a quote going around right now that starts, “Maybe your first love is the one that sticks with you because it’s the only one that will ever receive all of you.” When I read that, I thought of him.

The next line of the quote goes, “After that, you learn better.”

And again, I thought of him.

Tagged: affect, first love, memoir, ponder, ruminate, travel

The Marching Morons

If you’ve never read this 1951 Science Fiction story, I recommend you do. The Marching Morons by C.M. Kornbluth. I’ve long held this up as an example of the direction in which U.S. society has been headed and I just read a note from Ben Bova to science blogger Pharyngula (P.Z. Meyers)  in which he calls it the ‘most prescient and chilling’ of science fiction stores. Meyers takes issue with this and finds the story stupid because the ‘solution’ to the problem is a non-solution.

Well, of course a scientist would see it that way, but I’m pretty sure Kornbluth wasn’t thinking like a scientist when he wrote it. He was just bugged by something and chose a semi-comedic form of storytelling in which to complain about it. I’ve often been tempted to write a story in which all the stupid people are wiped out by an anti-stupid virus, so I could understand his frustration.

Meyers came to pretty much the same conclusion as me with respect to workable solutions to the problem of self-satisfied idiots, but no one seemed to be following up on those ideas decades ago, when I read the story. And from what I can see now, the situation has only gotten worse.

So what will the future be? I am not any more sure than I was back when I first saw The Marching Morons, only these days, I’m a lot less inclined to find it funny.

Tagged: Ben Bova, Kornbluth, morons, pharyngula, science fiction

After the Fact

Image by Panthera Lee at Deviantart.net

“People fear death out of a wrong perception of awareness after the fact. But if you are dead, you are not aware. There is no awareness after death. There is nothing. Therefore, there is quite literally nothing to fear.”

“Bollocks.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can have it. But if I draw my knife and hold it up to your neck like this – Now, you don’t fear what you think is on the other side of death, whether or not it exists or any of that, do you?”

“Uh -“

“No, you don’t. What’s got you by the throat – he he he – is that you might cease to be aware of this existence, right?”

“Um -“

“People don’t fear death – how can they fear something they have no experience with? What they fear is an absence of life. Psssh. Your philosophy needs work. Hey! Innkeeper! I’d like a beer, please. And my friend here needs directions to the pisser.”

Tagged: death, Fear, philosophy

Birthday Girl

The Near Future

“She looks so cute.”

“Shhh – she’ll hear you. And we won’t get the picture.”

“Are you using the phone?”

“No – you never know who’s monitoring you and the pic might get accidentally uploaded somewhere.”

“That would be bad.”

“So I’m using the old camera.”

“Great; then we can print it and save it in the scrapbook.”

Sound of sigh. “I remember when we used to be able to take pictures of birthday parties with all the kids at the party in them.”

“I wish we could still do that, but even if their parents don’t object, someday the kids might sue us for violating their privacy or holding them up to ridicule.”

“I know. It’ll be enough if we get just the picture of the birthday girl.”

“Maybe someday we can show it to her.”

“Maybe. But it’s hard to know, and I’d hate to be taken to court by my own kid.”

“You’re right; we’ll just keep the pics for us. That’s safest, isn’t it?”

“Oh! She’s getting ready to blow out the candles! Take the picture!”

“Got it. Look, it’s great.”

“Jeez, I hope she doesn’t remember us doing this.”

“Me too.”

Tagged: birthday, dystopia, modern life, privacy

Character Is

 

What if I don’t want to, she asked me.

It’s a consideration, I replied. But not one that will change my mind.

When will you come back?

When it’s appropriate.

When is that?

I’ll know. Until then, you’ll have to bear with it.

Aren’t you asking a lot of a kid?

Indeed. I smiled. But it can’t be helped, and you are up to it.

How do you know that?

I know your character.

Silence.

What is character?

Ah. I paused a moment to consider. Then, character is what choices you make and how you react to the consequences of those choices as well as the choices of others that affect you.

Silence. Tug on my hand. Stop. Looking at one another.

Then I know your character, too.

I smiled again. Indeed.

Tagged: character, conversation

Resentful and Rebellious and – Literary?

I’m feeling resentful and rebellious today.

I’ve always wanted to write genre. I cut my reading teeth on Andre Norton and Conan Doyle. I had a series love affair with Kenneth Robeson, Walter B. Gibson, and Fritz Leiber. But in my desire to read everything I found interesting, my inner writer’s core was was pierced by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. LeGuin, and something strange happened. What I loved to read and what I felt compelled to write became two different things.

While I drank at the fountain of flighted fancy, I wrote stories that had more in common with the authors we had studied in school; books with plots that made no sense to me or books and stories that seemed to have no plot but were all about characters I did not like. My happiest days revolved around the shared-world writing I did with my best friend where young women had the kind of adventures Doc Savage had, they showed the guys how defeating evil was done in the pages we traded back and forth. But in notebooks I didn’t share were parts of stories that were like Polaroids of my life – me trying to make sense of the crazy quilt of my experiences. I wanted to understand what had been un-understandable to me about my family, where and how we had lived and dealt with one another.

For a while, in my twenties and thirties, I gave myself over to these explorations on paper, which led to other stories; stories that seemed to fall out of my pen with the effortlessness of water streaming from a thin spout. I even tried to sell a few, which did not sell, but garnered notes and encouragement from magazine editors.

Life intervened and I pursued painting and sculpting, writing only when compelled to and sticking to short prose poems and fanfiction that was shared with no one.

When I began, decades later, to write again, I started by taking a memoir class with a friend. From there, we went to meeting once a week to exchange progress on our genre novels. But he was young and newly married and life as a husband and then father overtook his enthusiasm for his fictional characters. Left alone, I managed to finish my novel, but not to re-write it. I had no energy for it. I thought, I am a collaborator at heart. I may write on my own, but I cannot make progress without having someone to share the journey with me.

Social media grew, caught my attention, gave me a few places in which to find other writers. I wrote genre short stories. I plotted out a genre series. All of this work gave me satisfaction, but not the experience I longed for – those times where the words came thick and fast and my fingers could barely keep up with them. I had had that, and I missed it. I thought it was because I had become too much of an analyst and could no longer enjoy the process in its purest form. Or that I was being naive; a translational type of writing was not the normal way of things. Workmanlike application was.

An early retirement had left my days free of work-related obligations. The conditions of a long-held dream had been met: I could create all day. Still, my dissatisfaction and disappointment grew. I was writing next to nothing. I turned again to sculpting to create something in some form, but the writing would not leave me alone.

In response to something said in a Twitter Chat, I wrote my first flash fiction. It surprised me. The first sentence came whole into my mind and the rest followed without pause. I could barely keep up. I tried it again. And again. And again. And each experience was the same.

I thought, maybe this will free me and I’ll be able to get back to my novel and write other things – by which I meant the genre things I had been playing with for so long. But as days and short writings passed, I came no closer to returning to my detective/fantasy novel or the fantasy short story I had plotted out. I grew even more restive and frustrated. This came out in my online writer conversations and a friend approached me to discuss it. In talking, I mentioned an old, old idea for a literary novel which I had discarded as pretentious and unworkable. Through our conversation, it became approachable and workable. I was amazed. I was enlightened. I wrote down what we had talked about, feeling tenuous hope and some astonishment.

That was yesterday. Today, I am resentful and rebellious.

Last night I finished off a book in a series I have been binge-reading. I finished it by skipping ahead to the last few pages while a voice in the back of my mind yelled, What are you doing?! I purchased the next two books in the series and promptly hid them on my Nexus 7 so they wouldn’t be visible to me the next time I opened it. Then I went through all of the other titles visible – most of them genre – and hid those as well.  What are you doing?! It was like that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Hal keeps asking Dave about his actions and Dave just keeps on working, never answers.

All of a sudden, I had lost interest in reading genre. I have rejected it.

I’m sure this won’t last. I have not somehow come suddenly ‘to my senses’ or now view genre writing as less than. But for now, some part of my writer’s mind will not let me enjoy it, lose myself in it, binge on it. Nor do I feel impelled to start work on that literary novel my friend and I talked about. I don’t know what will happen. This experience is new to me. But even though I feel resentful about losing my enjoyment in genre books – however temporary – and rebellious towards my writer’s mind for whatever it is planning for me, I plan to go with it.

I am an impulsive person who learned early not to indulge her impulses without thinking first. But I trust my intuition. I know this is the right direction to take. It’s upending me, re-arranging how I think about some things and I have to give it the time and energy to do that. It’s scary because I’m not in conscious control of the process. I will be different, though not necessarily better. I accept that. But I may resent it – at least a little.

Tagged: Genre, impulse, intuition, literary, writing life

I wonder what she saw

 

 

She smelled of stale dish water and cigarettes, but she wasn’t smoking. She sat on her stool at the end of the bar and grinned toothlessly at herself in the mirror.

I wonder what she saw.

I ordered a beer. I hate beer. But this place – probably didn’t have a wine that was worth drinking. Dark, smelly, with sticky floors and people’s faces all washed out by the bad lighting.

Why had I come in? What was here for me in this place with past regrets griming up the walls and leaving shadows in all the corners where old memories holed up like spiders under the counter?

The toothless woman turned her head to look at me and laughed under her breath.

I wonder what she saw.

Tagged: appearance, memory, mirrors, seeing

The Black Dog

Black Dog

It isn’t sudden or violent. The Black Dog.

It comes and you don’t notice it. It lays down at the very peripheral of your vision.

It waits until you are used to it in that spot and it moves – just a bit – closer. Before you know it, you are stepping around it, stepping over it.

Then it gets larger. And larger.

And it comes to sit next to you. And you’re strangely comforted by it.

And then it is in your lap. And then on your chest.

Someone may come by and remark upon it, upon the need to make it go away. They shoo at it. But it just regards them with no expression.

And your eyes look the same when you wonder why they bother. Because it is so troublesome to bother about things.

 

Chestnuts are growing

Do what you will, Winter comes

The Black Dog brings it

 

 

Image: By Aura2 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Tagged: black dog, depression, haibun, sadness