Book Recommendation: The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

I bought this book after reading Neil Gaiman's introduction of it in A View from the Cheap Seats. (A dangerous book, if you're running out of shelf space: I bought five new books as I read it, and only one was a kindle edition.)  With The 13 Clocks, I'm actually glad I got the physical copy, because this is a gorgeous book. Just look at the artwork:  

When I opened the book, the first thing I saw was Gaiman's introduction; a fun coincidence that I ended up with that edition. I can't believe I've never come across this book before. It was love at first page. Just consider the opening:

Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart.

And the descriptions! Here are a few of my favourites: 

His voice sounded like iron dropped on velvet.

She wore serenity brightly like the rainbow.

"The Todal looks like a blob of gulp,"he said. "It makes a sound like rabbits screaming, and smells of old, unopened rooms."

If you like dark fairytales, you need to hunt down this book and devour it in one reading, preferably in a dark room with the wind howling outside. 

Whitman's Civil War: Writing and Imagining Loss, Death, and Disaster week 4

This week's class focused on language and theme. I'm constantly amazed by the subtlety of Whitman's poems, and how much he conveys with a simple reversal of words or use of parenthetical pauses. I'm starting to look at his work as a puzzle: every time something odd appears, you can bet it's not just coincidence. Maybe you'll find a puzzle  piece you didn't know was missing, a piece that makes you see the poem at another level. It's fascinating. Here are a few things our instructors, professors Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill,  pointed out:

In "Vigil Strange I kept on the Field One Night," a poem about a soldier keeping vigil for his dying comrade, the placement of the word "strange" is, well, strange. Why not "a strange vigil"? With Whitman's choice of syntax, "strange" attaches itself to both "vigil" and "I," indicating that the "I" is off-balance, strange, as well as the situation. Cool, huh? And Whitman also uses homonyms to great effect, like the pair son/sun:

And there and then, and bathed by the rising sun, my

son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I de-posited;

 It's also curious that in Drum-Taps, the poem that preceded this is "Mother and Babe," so there's a juxtaposition of life and death, the babe sleeping in his mother's arms and the dead soldier in his comrade's. Whitman encountered many dying soldiers when he volunteered at the hospitals and comforted them as best he could, sometimes taking the role of mother (and father, lover, nurse, etc. for that matter) for those dying alone and far from family. That experience probably affected this poem. You can see a similar juxtaposition in the pairing of “A Sight in Camp in the Day-Break Grey and Dim” and “A Farm Picture,” the image of the dead soldiers, about to be buried in the field that was a farm field (and will be again) and the image of a farm, cattle feeding on the grass nourished by dead soldiers and the survivors of the war getting nourishment from the cattle.

Another poem, "A March in the Ranks, Hard-Pressed," was inspired by a soldier's story of a church turned hospital, where he saw a young, mortally wounded soldier dying on the altar. Because the notebook Whitman used at the time survived, we get a fascinating glimpse into how he turned the story into a poem. Some of the phrases the soldier used make it into the poem unaltered. The poem is also one long sentence, enforcing the idea of a march, but it's broken by two parenthetical phrases, which turn out to be the most important bits in the poem.

The first phrase is "he is shot in the abdomen," a decidedly unpoetic phrase, a clinical description, and the other is the only metaphorical description in the poem, "the youngster's face is white as a lily," almost too sentimental for Whitman. When you connect the two, that's when the magic happens. The soldier was shot in the abdomen, a fatal wound, he's bleeding out. That's why his face is white as a lily. Why a lily? The boy is cut down in his prime, like a cut lily; you can see its beauty, but it will soon start to fade. We're in a church, so the lily also symbolises the funeral lily, and the Easter lily, a symbol of resurrection. The instructors also pointed out the word "temporarily," and how awkward it is in a poem. But that's precisely why Whitman put it there: the narrator can only staunch the flow of blood temporarily, not stop it, just like the word slows the reader down but doesn't stop the flow of the poem.

At my feet more distinctly, a soldier, a mere lad, in

danger of bleeding to death, (he is shot in the abdomen;)

I staunch the blood temporarily, (the youngster's face is

white as a lily;)

There's also another inversion: 

But first I bend to the dying lad—his eyes open—a 

half-smile gives he me; 

He me. It brings the narrator and the soldier together, perfect to illustrate that intimate moment.

Our assignment this week was to write about some event or experience that evoked a contradiction in us, like in Whitman's "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun." How can you both hate and love the same thing, find it beautiful and horrifying?

Writing Book: Deep Point of View by Rayne Hall

I'd been trying to improve my character development skills for a while and wondering why it's sometimes so hard to get up close and personal with my protag, when I came across the concept of deep point of view. Basically it's the same thing all the books on description try to teach you: show, don't tell.

What deep point of view comes down to is cutting any distancing words and just stating what the protagonist feels, thinks, and experiences. Mostly the culprits are words like "felt," "thought," "wondered," and sense words like "saw," "smelled, and "tasted." Using active verbs and avoiding author intrusions is also a part of this. The idea is to make it feel like the reader is living the story, not reading it. Writing deep point of view requires changing the way you think and write: you have to become the character, separate your own attitudes and reactions from the character's, almost like you're acting. At first it's hard, but when you've been doing it long enough, it becomes second nature.

The book says that it's not for beginners, but I found it easy enough to follow. It's a fast read with clear examples and useful exercises, so no technical stuff, if that scares you. Hall discusses using different points of view,  picking the right POV character and avoiding head-hopping, filtering observations through the character's experiences and interests, giving the full sensory experience, the difference between male and female POV, using situation and mood as filters, writing character thoughts and emotions, the importance of keeping trigger and response in the right order, using similes for expressing backstory, how to describe your protagonist's appearance in deep POV, and the importance of body language. We also get a few sample stories. If you've read a few writing books, you probably know most of this already, but it's useful to have it all collected in one volume.

I found this book useful, but if all the things I listed in the last paragraph seem like kiddie stuff to you, might be that you're already writing deep point of view without knowing it. If you're a newbie like me, you might want to check it out. And it's worth noting that this book is part of a series. You can explore the other volumes on the writer's website.

Raven's Wing

Aren't these gorgeous? I got them as souvenirs on my trip to Iceland and was a bit sad I couldn't fit more into my suitcase, but I did some googling and found a webshop that ships to Europe, USA, and Canada. The art is by Sveinbjörg Hallgrímsdóttir, and her company is called Sveinbjörg.  I like the ravens the best (yeah, big shock), but the Garden Party series looks nice, too. 

In the Forest of Memory

. . . is up on the SpeckLit site, along with the rest of my new drabbles.

This one is my favourite so far. Check it out here, if you want. And there's lots of cool stuff by other writers, too. It's amazing what people manage to express in a hundred words!

Whitman's Civil War: Writing and Imagining Loss, Death, and Disaster week 3

This week our instructors, Professors Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill, talked about how Whitman's voice changed with what he was writing, like when he wrote letters to the family of wounded soldiers, he wrote in the voice of the soldier. I've never thought that in writing a letter for someone, the writer's voice comes through, because I've imagined it to be more like taking dictation, but that's not the whole truth. These letters were written for a specific audience, the loved one of the soldier, but they were also passed around and helped with fundraising. The more effective the letter, the more people it got passed to. The poem "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" is also interesting in its abstraction: you can't tell who the soldiers were or even which side they were fighting for.

 When reading "Opening of the Secession War," I noticed how different names were used for the war, and both sides used names that fit their ideologies The South called it “The War Between the States” or “The War for Southern Independence,” while the North had “The War of the Rebellion,” “The Great Rebellion,” or “The War for the Union.” Freed slaves named it “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion” and "The Freedom War.” The names say a lot about what the war meant to people. It's also easy to forget that while we know how long the war lasted from reading history books, the people experiencing it didn't. Whitman thought this was a rebellion that would be over and done with in a couple of weeks. Those four years  (1861-1865) of uncertainty and horror must have felt like a lifetime.

One of the poems we studied  this week was "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" from Drum Taps. You can read it below:

WHEN I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he
lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

          Walt Whitman/Drum Taps

It's a strange poem to find in the middle of poetry about the war, but it's a moment of reflection. When things are really bad, you can look at the stars and think of the immense distances in space and time and how small a war or a human lifetime is in the great scheme of things. There is a future, even if it seems like the end of the world now. It helps put things in perspective, looking from "time to time." Some people read this poem as Whitman rejecting the science, but as the instructors explained, he only understands that he's looking into the past, that the light he is seeing has come a long way, because of the lecture he attended. It's a beautiful moment. This is something that is useful to remember as a writer: a little light in the darkness can bring everything into sharper focus.

For this week's assignment, we wrote about a conflict or trauma viewed from an unexpected place that might reveal something unexpected about the conflict. Very challenging.

Science Fiction Classics: The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Images from wikipedia.org

John Wyndham Parker Lucas Beynon Harris (1903-1969), or John Wyndham, as he was more widely known, was an English science fiction writer. He's famous for his "cosy catastrophes," disaster stories that take place in the English countryside. Three of his works are on my Science Fiction Classics list, so I decided to lump these two together. The Chrysalids, which some consider his finest work, is the third one, but I left that for later.

Triffids is a fun read, but the plot feels quite familiar. That's not surprising, because almost every zombie flick ever made owes it a lot. 28 Days Later has whole scenes that feel like they were taken almost straight from the book, and the opening of The Walking Dead probably has its roots here, also. The premise is interesting: what if almost everyone in the world went blind overnight? How long would it take for society to degenerate into savagery? Add to that the flesh-eating and walking plants, the triffids, and you have a recipe for disaster with all the fixings.

Cuckoos was a bit of a let-down for me, because I enjoyed Triffids so much. It explores another disturbing idea: everyone in the small village of Midwich loses a day and all the women find themselves mysteriously pregnant afterwards. They then give birth to strange, alien children, and creepiness ensues. For me, the execution felt a bit boring, and I didn't like the point-of-view shifts between the first person narrator and an omniscient view. There are also a lot of long conversations about morality and society and evolution, which slowed up the pace. The plot gets going when the children start to grow up, but it's still a bit slow. It was okay, but I probably wouldn't read it again. 

With both books, you can see the phantom of the Cold War in the distance: the triffids were genetically engineered by the Russians, and we also find out that the Russians had Cuckoos of their own, whom they kept alive in case the children would be an advantage in the arms race.

I think these books are considered classics more because of the ideas they explore than any literary merits. Wyndham's characters are a bit on the thin side and his style is clear and readable, but not very distinctive. That's the problem with the older science fiction classics: they tend to feel a bit cliché, because the idea has been recycled so many times since the classic was written. But you have to remember which was the original.   

All of the books mentioned above were published in the 1950s, so you have to take that into account while reading them. The attitudes towards women feel quite outdated. It didn't really bother me that much with Triffids, but considering the subject matter of The Midwich Cuckoos, I felt the full horror of what was done to the women went unexplored. I'd be curious to see what a woman writer would do with the same subject matter; it would be a very different book. While the "mansplaining" and how the women act can feel cringeworthy to the modern reader, I think Wyndham's attitudes might have been considered outlandish in the 50s, even progressive: women studying engineering, working outside the home, thinking for themselves; it's all there. It's like Wyndham's frustrated with how women won't help themselves and prefer to stay at home and have babies and mooch off their husbands. You have to remember Wyndham was born in 1903, so he was in his fifties when he wrote these books. I think that if he had been born later, all of this would have been handled differently.

So, I recommend Triffids for its fun B-movie high jinks, but maybe skip Cuckoos if you're not passionate about understanding the history of science fiction.

Science Fiction Classics read: 42/193