tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78365980882793399682024-02-20T12:41:37.137-07:00Notes from the Perilous RealmA Guide to the Land of StoryAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.comBlogger230125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-76134246393590997722013-09-15T12:14:00.000-06:002013-09-15T12:14:17.646-06:00The story continues ... elsewhere<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I am sad to say that I am discontinuing this blog on stories and storytelling and moving my web presence to another location. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I will still be posting on stories, fantasy and writing from time to time on my new author website, at <a href="http://thomaswharton.ca/" target="_blank">http://thomaswharton.ca/</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Thank you to everyone who took the time to read my posts and to comment on them and support what I've been doing. May you have a lifetime of wonderful journeys into the lands of Story.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOIOAj4NcAnUFZGW6EUAXU4E4HvlZYkl_HPP3fPqx_0zozXwNwHYojxpX0OHbMWoJ42A3MFgcnAxP5iJP9zUV6ZVs24DsU_dwaLGPrmAVfm7nSmkJOl0NV_gkT2PVePgdrk0QbNSryVnE/s1600/book+trails.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOIOAj4NcAnUFZGW6EUAXU4E4HvlZYkl_HPP3fPqx_0zozXwNwHYojxpX0OHbMWoJ42A3MFgcnAxP5iJP9zUV6ZVs24DsU_dwaLGPrmAVfm7nSmkJOl0NV_gkT2PVePgdrk0QbNSryVnE/s640/book+trails.jpg" width="374" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-5608005972304522672013-06-17T08:42:00.001-06:002013-06-17T08:44:27.155-06:00Eleven things you didn't know about dragons<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2yrhEH89byL4TSA8ov87HPAe-Nr3OLdHu_xzJ63BxPfK8WLczqd3qPW-9focpvi0jn3KSVFcJtGg-MR-ybyfmOiXLe3YA_iHcVcYHRWCm6oJ0v6KpKsrWBEYfitdwSercReTBtZFLI04/s1600/Dragons_Global_Warming.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2yrhEH89byL4TSA8ov87HPAe-Nr3OLdHu_xzJ63BxPfK8WLczqd3qPW-9focpvi0jn3KSVFcJtGg-MR-ybyfmOiXLe3YA_iHcVcYHRWCm6oJ0v6KpKsrWBEYfitdwSercReTBtZFLI04/s400/Dragons_Global_Warming.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><strike>Ten</strike> Eleven Things You Didn’t Know about Dragons</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> (a revised version of a popular post from the past)</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">1. Dragons guard hoards of treasure not out of greed, but
because of the healing and rejuvenating properties of gold. Dragons lying on
hoards have been overheard purring. How else do you think they manage to live for hundreds of years?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">2. That’s right, some dragons purr, like cats. This should
not, however, be taken as a sign that the dragon is well-disposed toward you. As with domestic felines, deep contented purring often precedes a particularly vicious attack.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">3. The average dragon’s pulse beats once per minute. A
dragon’s heartbeat may be audible from a mile away, or felt as a tremor in the
ground from an even greater distance. That is why many professional
dragonslayers go barefoot, to get as much advance warning of the presence and
location of their enemy as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">4. Dragon bone is the hardest substance known to be produced
by animal bodies. On the Mohs scale of hardness (in which diamond rates at 10),
human tooth enamel is rated at 5, and dragon bone comes in at 9, the same
hardness as sapphires and rubies, and far harder than quartz, iron and steel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">5. The longest-lived dragon is reputed to be Tau Lung, who
was born before the formation of the Earth and inhabits the Sun (he may be
responsible for sunspots and solar flares). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The shortest-lived dragons are
the “offspring” of Motherworms, immense sack-like black dragons capable of vomiting
hundreds of small fiery “drakelets” at their enemies. The drakelets can briefly
fly on their own power but in a matter of moments they fall apart into gobbets
of flame or burn to ash. Since the drakelets do not last long enough to reach
maturity, it is not known how Motherworms actually reproduce. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">6. There are seventeen officially recognized classes of dragon,
including the well-known Firedrakes, as well as ice dragons, riverdrakes, celestial
dragons, bookworms, etc. The classification of certain dragon-like creatures is
currently in dispute, most notably in the case of the scaly flatwyrm, a
parasitic organism that infests the digestive system of dragons and can grow to
be over one hundred feet long. The scaly flatwyrm most often infests
fire-breathers, and its irritating presence in the dragon’s bowels is said to
be the real reason these dragons so often go on destructive rampages. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">7. Dragonflesh contains no fat. It is the healthiest and most
vitamin-rich meat available, if you can get it. One has to be careful cooking
dragon, however, since it can spontaneously combust, sending gobbets of fiery
nastiness in every direction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">8. The most intelligent dragon ever known, Auuggg the
Venerable, held a Chair in astronomy and synchronicity studies at Hypatian University in New
Alexandria. She taught there for seventy-nine years before taking a well-earned
retirement, though she still continued to give lectures as a
Professor Emeritus for a long time, lectures that well-attended even though it was said they did tend to "drag on." Auuggg's office was a cavern deep underground said to be lined
with the bones of hapless graduate students who never finished their
dissertations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">9. The vulnerable spot on a dragon’s hide is not always on
its underbelly. Dragons have been known to have what professional dragonslayers
call “sweet spots” on other parts of their bodies, including the head, limbs,
and tail. There have been legendary dragons whose hides were said to be
completely impenetrable, but these creatures apparently all died of boredom
after several centuries and thousands of failed attempts on their lives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">10. According to most enigmatists, a dragon is an event, not
a thing. A fire-breather like the legendary Smaug, for example, is what happens when heat, oxygen, and
combustible material combine with story.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">11. There are some who attribute <a href="http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Effect_of_Dragons_on_Global_Warming" target="_blank">the global warming trend</a> to the increased activity of fire-drakes. This is, of course, simply more evasion of human responsibility. Fire-breathers and all other kinds of dragons are in decline as a result of pollution, human population growth, and the rise of extreme weather events. It seems that not even our oldest and most powerful myths are invulnerable to the kinds of sudden, unprecedented change our species is bringing to this world.</span><br />
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-1890930608209573052013-06-12T08:54:00.003-06:002013-06-12T08:54:45.514-06:00Kids these days<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3zbPd6yTOxgRfiQfffgnSckODCNXo8Yr1b8BiuVn4h45nFVc-8y_hhHsep2h7U5INdCgCI0DglDXVXXnnsKYvr0PhPWxuGZ8VhpjCg17ImWggsnbbjiF4p85Qw5gI86XjrjqMOOhA3HY/s1600/school+bus+kid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3zbPd6yTOxgRfiQfffgnSckODCNXo8Yr1b8BiuVn4h45nFVc-8y_hhHsep2h7U5INdCgCI0DglDXVXXnnsKYvr0PhPWxuGZ8VhpjCg17ImWggsnbbjiF4p85Qw5gI86XjrjqMOOhA3HY/s400/school+bus+kid.jpg" width="266" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">From my writing notebook:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></span>
<div style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Pulled up behind a schoolbus yesterday afternoon, at a fourway stop. Bus</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> full of kids, grade one or two probably, bouncing around, chattering,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> playfighting. The usual mayhem. Poor bus driver.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">As the bus pulled away from the stop, a little boy in the back seat turned</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> and looked out the window at me. His face lit up with the biggest,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> sweetest smile ... as he gave me the finger.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">This is one of those moments for which it pays to have a notebook handy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-81973155424731157932013-06-07T08:12:00.001-06:002013-06-08T12:50:55.304-06:00A writer's journey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmyU-k1jHQayeFai3GG4lNaihb-FLr_Zvio4yVRIG_j-cermm9pbAazPIKZTwdnoAgyk39T3OBTTvuzE2OU1x608eBLOGGcogWwRBqiBd1HaB1nrSMWaC0XSsBqzjiyY6b3fAxD_o6zIE/s1600/IMG_0618.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmyU-k1jHQayeFai3GG4lNaihb-FLr_Zvio4yVRIG_j-cermm9pbAazPIKZTwdnoAgyk39T3OBTTvuzE2OU1x608eBLOGGcogWwRBqiBd1HaB1nrSMWaC0XSsBqzjiyY6b3fAxD_o6zIE/s400/IMG_0618.jpg" width="298" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I wanted to see mountains again, and find somewhere quiet where I could finish my book. So I got on a train.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWOQeMnlmzeAGf6vUDx01IpOM_tObV9hrxzbmG1CDsDAcBzVAtrqyogk1QWjXX-tp1DcFKRxDysjzpNKkrb9G2prNuJx8xCH5YhCYH9x2D0zXks8hFuOQbJZKdgQ3gSmzTG_7E84Z73GU/s1600/IMG_0630.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWOQeMnlmzeAGf6vUDx01IpOM_tObV9hrxzbmG1CDsDAcBzVAtrqyogk1QWjXX-tp1DcFKRxDysjzpNKkrb9G2prNuJx8xCH5YhCYH9x2D0zXks8hFuOQbJZKdgQ3gSmzTG_7E84Z73GU/s400/IMG_0630.jpg" width="298" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I had never ridden on a passenger train before. Walking the narrow corridors, trying to keep my balance as the train shook and rocked, all I could think of were old movies about spies and femmes fatale.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7zfpFZFq7A5EmECXO4ZOLSpIIqeupAijJmhUFQgUHzV63pTstHJA4YsxVrvjslUQrAPuyjgAYWoHe8bkXSN7Sq20nMN7262EZosWAURMAVrNDKosaPjVO4l1qCpCG725GRMS6ackENgA/s1600/IMG_6709.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7zfpFZFq7A5EmECXO4ZOLSpIIqeupAijJmhUFQgUHzV63pTstHJA4YsxVrvjslUQrAPuyjgAYWoHe8bkXSN7Sq20nMN7262EZosWAURMAVrNDKosaPjVO4l1qCpCG725GRMS6ackENgA/s400/IMG_6709.jpg" width="298" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I discovered that other travellers had ridden this train and left their words behind.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga5IgaBC6aKVXm2NmVWFzpDzxNMNmo3j_Upy1U7MwvSYGMal2BLi2kfaRG_TUgR1xPfJmZsP1N8egx3pI8nkydK6BxwgzJ3PFUu0Rng9HAu-i18ZthaJiLoRDqHKHDoS-JbQfrdmoMab0/s1600/IMG_6842.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga5IgaBC6aKVXm2NmVWFzpDzxNMNmo3j_Upy1U7MwvSYGMal2BLi2kfaRG_TUgR1xPfJmZsP1N8egx3pI8nkydK6BxwgzJ3PFUu0Rng9HAu-i18ZthaJiLoRDqHKHDoS-JbQfrdmoMab0/s320/IMG_6842.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Destroy all former timetables."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This seemed like pertinent advice. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDIuA5YxkAyAHubkkKSxgQCSfSLBscDJjYlFHpHWmbbIAHAxO5QR_PxNWijw7y1Dn3ajYpB2Or8zS4hlA4ENu-E0BNCV0s6V8QlI7wpSxN_jnT09gLlDInFfjyY7rmQUANN70z8sNNZPY/s1600/IMG_0631.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDIuA5YxkAyAHubkkKSxgQCSfSLBscDJjYlFHpHWmbbIAHAxO5QR_PxNWijw7y1Dn3ajYpB2Or8zS4hlA4ENu-E0BNCV0s6V8QlI7wpSxN_jnT09gLlDInFfjyY7rmQUANN70z8sNNZPY/s400/IMG_0631.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> And I saw mountains.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdUCvOSMAgWCAZouLESa9NBYOKk79hnSBnCM5LtX_LBgahv46dEPI8dqAajJeh8IaL2WF2SbmrSGSGlouFuI4NCNA5M5plgcZ_2OwPgFnA7DqXfJ9m71xzY5tyOq7jk5eaJY7DzooQNBU/s1600/IMG_0641.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdUCvOSMAgWCAZouLESa9NBYOKk79hnSBnCM5LtX_LBgahv46dEPI8dqAajJeh8IaL2WF2SbmrSGSGlouFuI4NCNA5M5plgcZ_2OwPgFnA7DqXfJ9m71xzY5tyOq7jk5eaJY7DzooQNBU/s400/IMG_0641.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There were mountains.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKWiFKDIDgx0jx6IGRBggj8D0kSpsceZvRoYqwW5nqARNrAEKeUc04dbrpP3Ko6v3re4hQ09LzBXygrE9IeL_VdQyvabGSS9gxUzgZECMw07fGp_wV-6sywPqZ3ntp_Xu91TIsjYLKdbM/s1600/IMG_6821.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKWiFKDIDgx0jx6IGRBggj8D0kSpsceZvRoYqwW5nqARNrAEKeUc04dbrpP3Ko6v3re4hQ09LzBXygrE9IeL_VdQyvabGSS9gxUzgZECMw07fGp_wV-6sywPqZ3ntp_Xu91TIsjYLKdbM/s400/IMG_6821.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> And then, more mountains.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There were so few people on board I sometimes had the feeling I was alone on this train.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Where was everybody? Could there be anything more eerie than a deserted bar car?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">At night, in the empty dome car, I almost convinced myself that I was dreaming this entire journey.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">At sunset on the second day we came to a wide river. On our right hand, waterfalls plunged from the rock, mere inches from the train windows. We went around a headland, then another, and another. The river kept widening.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> The river went on widening until it became the sea, and it seemed we had come to the very end of the world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">We stopped at a town on an island, the terminus of the railway. The next morning, ships anchored in the harbour seemed to float in the fog. I sat by the docks and made notes for the last pages of my book, struggling to tied up a few loose strands of plot. The fog slowly lifted. This was supposed to be one of the rainiest places in North America, but the whole time I was there it was sunny, except for the occasional morning fog.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Unlikely reminders of writing were to be found here. I wondered if the people who built and named this inn had ever actually read the book and knew how it ended?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> There were many reminders of the power of the sea...</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn6nx6nvTmp1I6__ReeFRIn1MSsxycCPKH0saBpGbBtEys2oCBbyfY2xoUDOiZnrHF9nYCO0ECHRgvkPZDAqpKM3nQ6CmWnAmfJjq_z8loPv9dl7QrwVkBWQCAgNPlFIyhifCF7NIqwZA/s1600/IMG_0700.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn6nx6nvTmp1I6__ReeFRIn1MSsxycCPKH0saBpGbBtEys2oCBbyfY2xoUDOiZnrHF9nYCO0ECHRgvkPZDAqpKM3nQ6CmWnAmfJjq_z8loPv9dl7QrwVkBWQCAgNPlFIyhifCF7NIqwZA/s400/IMG_0700.jpg" width="396" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">... and the power of the spirit.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8xV6abxdH6FoSvkK4Jz3RMx9CphCoJpNbFegW5xm4lNBeSUrDdju8PphYP-JBmbemfjzUI4y2ttcSJ0RDOKo0m62111LVp1XRzKBex2ey-2j9sTdr3bGIHc2K3bdPLfDpLLTUJ428Goo/s1600/IMG_6750.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8xV6abxdH6FoSvkK4Jz3RMx9CphCoJpNbFegW5xm4lNBeSUrDdju8PphYP-JBmbemfjzUI4y2ttcSJ0RDOKo0m62111LVp1XRzKBex2ey-2j9sTdr3bGIHc2K3bdPLfDpLLTUJ428Goo/s400/IMG_6750.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The isle was full of noises, sounds and sweet airs...</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTfqN-_UVhs1sg4RSd-ckIGvIBrPEYFK8DPGcKvSZiKiLGWbAZpiksRf_YxlhRiBhlQsZvEoilN6PPZW64syiokib6fWA5jaocIE6tFtsBRMIONb9PyXnqBhVBPyRN8NWg3qrH_bdQp08/s1600/IMG_6744.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTfqN-_UVhs1sg4RSd-ckIGvIBrPEYFK8DPGcKvSZiKiLGWbAZpiksRf_YxlhRiBhlQsZvEoilN6PPZW64syiokib6fWA5jaocIE6tFtsBRMIONb9PyXnqBhVBPyRN8NWg3qrH_bdQp08/s320/IMG_6744.jpg" width="306" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Actually, in the forest there was a pervading scent very reminiscent of cannabis. I knew that the good folk of this far western land were quite indulgent about such things, but had they indulged enough to perfume an entire forest? Eventually I traced the aroma to this plant, skunk cabbage.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> In the mornings I would write, and then go out and explore the town. It had seen some hard times in the past...</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjgHHU6xQl_t2gsBWPTZ1YGuLusCPwdP5p7i7fRO6QThklnJew84XTs_OUa3EZPaVB6PKREjQDq6XbkYZfX7AvM6K5lCwr7Rl4HXFyBtwO6EfwPyEfPz7AG2OQBbvOwrsHFmgsxZ2XE8c/s1600/IMG_6737.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjgHHU6xQl_t2gsBWPTZ1YGuLusCPwdP5p7i7fRO6QThklnJew84XTs_OUa3EZPaVB6PKREjQDq6XbkYZfX7AvM6K5lCwr7Rl4HXFyBtwO6EfwPyEfPz7AG2OQBbvOwrsHFmgsxZ2XE8c/s400/IMG_6737.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">But in places there were new coats of paint and the local people I spoke with were sure that better times were on the way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The last strands of the novel began to weave together, and I felt that a little of the sea, forest and mountains were woven in with them.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9s_xI8ramgNrWYD0LQq4PP6mnuuJ5x92J2d-tlmegSWUitKiWMeqBFmDdpVINsW6oB9wgiTkmdcexAiWDnEfzBPtZLcaxMWSZp9UXsU3aVCPTUfRe0kMXRs78sN5jfGNynCM1TMF1uM8/s1600/IMG_6784.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9s_xI8ramgNrWYD0LQq4PP6mnuuJ5x92J2d-tlmegSWUitKiWMeqBFmDdpVINsW6oB9wgiTkmdcexAiWDnEfzBPtZLcaxMWSZp9UXsU3aVCPTUfRe0kMXRs78sN5jfGNynCM1TMF1uM8/s400/IMG_6784.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It was time to go home. The train set off through the morning mist.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdbnOM6OaDdLf8-16K3jfbNqLDdDVfvZ5NbMrknA4xyD0qDih61tM-R_LCuFKzpqX61-UAUg78O1FU3K1EQsfTOqS8pPqieH4CrEY_Y_elzpQCPTA7FdAHTclVHis4zaOnoA8L7zLVfE4/s1600/IMG_0743.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdbnOM6OaDdLf8-16K3jfbNqLDdDVfvZ5NbMrknA4xyD0qDih61tM-R_LCuFKzpqX61-UAUg78O1FU3K1EQsfTOqS8pPqieH4CrEY_Y_elzpQCPTA7FdAHTclVHis4zaOnoA8L7zLVfE4/s400/IMG_0743.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It really was a dream train. At one point we somehow ended up far south of the border.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxahS6UCHKzpA52rGv9kV0V3q0qXkcLDLZ70tbndgbTCipyq5ikFsqvw01USRAphswUARc2Lw0fmsNIqqkPWRdUbRGiqcgDcH0ygISHTcpyEGNhR7oiebuPbnNkbfFOWB8xq-_eLxdV0c/s1600/IMG_6841.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxahS6UCHKzpA52rGv9kV0V3q0qXkcLDLZ70tbndgbTCipyq5ikFsqvw01USRAphswUARc2Lw0fmsNIqqkPWRdUbRGiqcgDcH0ygISHTcpyEGNhR7oiebuPbnNkbfFOWB8xq-_eLxdV0c/s400/IMG_6841.jpg" width="223" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another half-deserted train! When the service manager (no longer called the conductor, alas) wasn't looking, I opened the back door and got some fresh air.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We passed the wreck of a freight that had gone off the rails a few days before. Reminded me of the state my novel had been in more than once.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We stopped briefly at a place called Penny (pop. 2), the last post office in Canada to be serviced only by train. Soon, like the Canadian penny itself, this place may be a thing of the past.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The train came to a tourist town in the mountains where I'd lived as a teenager. I disembarked to spend a couple of days here and found some accommodation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Memories of the past were everywhere.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I was sad to discover that my old school friend had sold his family's gift shop/bookstore. Now it was being refurbished to be ready for peak tourist season. I'd worked here for a while when I was in high school, selling books (probably reading more than I sold). Years later the store kept my books in stock.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">On a trail I met a young woman who was worried about bears, so we agreed to walk together (I didn't mention that I was a little concerned about bears, too). The young woman was traveling across the country by herself. At the end of our walk together I told her that if she wanted to know more about the region she should check out a novel called <i>Icefields </i>by this guy named Thomas Wharton.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">At the local watering hole I had a beer to toast the memory of friends who'd passed on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Then it was time for the last leg. The dream train left the mountains and picked up speed as it came to the prairies. We rolled on through the night. I met a young man making his way home from Alberta to Ontario. The job he'd come west for hadn't worked out and he was going home in the hope of finding a job there. He was going to be on this train for two more days and nights, and he was looking forward to having a shower when he finally got home. "Even if Megan Fox wanted to get with me," he chuckled, "I'd tell her <i>sorry Megan, you gotta give me ten minutes to shower.</i>"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The young guy went to have a look at the dining car (where he couldn't afford to eat) and came back clutching something under his arm: one of those travel-sized boxes of cereal. He'd snatched it from the dining car when no one was looking. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">"Got my breakfast for tomorrow," he told me with a gleeful grin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I put him in my notebook, of course.</span><br />
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-18359268691115834122013-06-05T08:20:00.000-06:002013-06-05T08:20:52.214-06:00Going places
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial;">A day of writing. A whole day of
writing. That doesn't happen often</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> enough.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">But what is there to blog about a day of writing
when it’s gone well?</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial;">If I'd taken a</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">trip somewhere, I could tell you about
all the interesting people I'd met and</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> the places I'd seen. But sitting here all day at my
desk, where have I gone? I</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> feel I've gone somewhere. There’s a strong sense of having left my familiar domestic surroundings behind. I wasn't
really "here" most of the day. I was in the made-up world of the
story, but I was also in that</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">strange,
insubstantial, shifting half-world of language itself.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><br />
<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">Transferring from one bus to another in the city
of sentences, kayaking</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> the currents and eddies of prose rhythm, picking
my way through the thorny</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> thicket of punctuation. And all the choices to
be made at every turn, dead</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> ends to be backed out of, new routes to be
found, or excavated through</span><br />
<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">the seemingly solid rock of a stubborn paragraph. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial;">Constantly checking the map of my
Planned Route</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">against where I've
written to, and sometimes changing the map when it no</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">longer corresponds to an exciting new possibility that
the writing itself</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> has uncovered.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">The book is a train. I'm on a train of many cars. Each chapter is a car. But there are cars being added on as I go. And some I'm not quite allowed into yet, because they're only ghost cars as yet. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">It's a slow train. So slow. Even slower and more often held up by unscheduled circumstance than a Via passenger train pulling over at every siding to let the more important freights rocket past. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">The track is being laid down even as we go.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">And sometimes, every so often, on rare occasions, the writing is a bobsled. A vehicle fitting its groove perfectly and racing along without friction to the end of the sentence, the end of the paragraph, the end of the chapter. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">By mid-afternoon the vehicle I've been sitting in all day usually starts to
run out of gas, and I'm</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> forced to pull over. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">I unbuckle myself from
the desk and stand up to</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> stretch and see where I've gotten to, and I'm
back where I started.</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> I haven't gone anywhere at
all.</span></span></span><br />
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-33083398590048055182013-06-03T08:15:00.002-06:002013-06-03T08:15:31.537-06:00Filling plotholes
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpyJGq0ZoSshUTa8j8t2UwRP9BaLKR6aU73axvzjNm8B7g4Jy2Y2BImHxKYfzW46cUDK9nxH_9H8QgbJ3l8H7sJ2YhkYlgjrS3ZOx8JDe69Jm6Aqb06hQRULZaHxYYdLlk1OhjvF_gAhk/s1600/pothole.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpyJGq0ZoSshUTa8j8t2UwRP9BaLKR6aU73axvzjNm8B7g4Jy2Y2BImHxKYfzW46cUDK9nxH_9H8QgbJ3l8H7sJ2YhkYlgjrS3ZOx8JDe69Jm6Aqb06hQRULZaHxYYdLlk1OhjvF_gAhk/s400/pothole.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial;">With the warm summer weather, many
of those ugly, dangerous plotholes are being fixed all over town.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><br />
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<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">During winter, the vast, complicated novel that
is this city takes a</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">pounding from the
elements, and many well-used stretches of urban story fall</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">into disrepair. There are gaps in the record. Memory lapses. Deals and transactions that don't quite add up. Did I read that right? Wait a minute, a few chapters ago they were saying something entirely different...</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">So in spring, out come the
plothole-fixing crews. They put</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">up their
orange and yellow barriers and get to work filling in all the</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">gaps and cracks and rough spots in the metronarrative.</span><br />
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<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">This is noisy, messy work, and disrupts reader
traffic, leading to paragraph</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">jams, frayed
nerves and letters to the copyeditor about the perpetual state of</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">narrative de/construction the city seems to be under.
Anyone who's ever</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">been bogged down at the
intersection between two congested character arcs</span><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> knows what I'm talking about.</span><br />
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<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">Of course, that gooey filler they plug the
plotholes with isn't meant to</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">hold up in
the long term. It keeps the story going, for sure, but doesn't</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">really address the larger issues of storysprawl,
rampant cast growth, and</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">inadequate
narrative infrastructure. For that it's necessary to look at</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">the bigger picture of the stories we tell, how we tell them, and our future</span> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">storytelling needs.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;">I guess we should just be thankful we don't have a plothole problem as bad as Toronto's.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-73607352238099604162013-05-18T09:00:00.002-06:002013-05-18T09:00:47.365-06:00Focus<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqkQ3YzzH-6eKCYrdGNnJhztBYHVxHXzUgYY2kz8fihSzduhxNqP63Sb22BLflqBTLqnGCM9__q9LlxCnUmvpW0wYfT7G9Ien-GDqS0DhKoaKvVw9bMQFS3FJ-RfKE-WcrT-qGoSOM2pM/s1600/owl1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqkQ3YzzH-6eKCYrdGNnJhztBYHVxHXzUgYY2kz8fihSzduhxNqP63Sb22BLflqBTLqnGCM9__q9LlxCnUmvpW0wYfT7G9Ien-GDqS0DhKoaKvVw9bMQFS3FJ-RfKE-WcrT-qGoSOM2pM/s400/owl1.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">One day in my creative writing workshop we were discussing creativity and</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> the mind. The main point I wanted to make was that the mind is a wonderful</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> tool but elusive and fickle. The mind doesn't like to be coerced into</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> being creative on demand. When a problem comes up in writing, a writer has</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">to learn to trust that the mind is working on an answer even when we're</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> not consciously trying. Those wonderful ideas that seem to come out of</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> "nowhere" actually come from nowhere else but our minds, when we get out</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> of their way and let them do their job.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">How well do we really know our own minds? I asked. Then I thought it would</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> be a useful exercise to have the students try some meditation, to spend a</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> few minutes paying close attention to their own minds. I wanted them to</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> see how hard it is to get the mind to concentrate on one thing for any</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">length of time. I wanted them to see how alive the mind is, how hard it is</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> to tame.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Sit up straight, hands in your lap, eyes closed or looking downward, I</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> told them. Take three slow deep breaths and then do nothing but stay in</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> the present moment. When a thought comes up, let it pass and continue</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> holding your attention on the here and now. If you notice yourself going</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">off on a train of thought, gently drop it and return to the present</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> moment.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">And off they went. A hush, which is usually a terrible thing in teaching,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> descended over the room. At the end of 5 very long minutes I called a</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> halt.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Okay, I said, expecting sheepish laughter and lots of head-shaking, how</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> many people were able to stay completely focused on the present moment for</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> the full five minutes?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Every hand in the room went up.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">I gaped.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Nobody caught themselves drifting off, daydreaming, not even for a second?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Nope. Nobody.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">It was astonishing. It seemed that I had before me a room of unacknowledged young Zen</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; display: inline ! important; float: none; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> masters. I realized later that what I had before me was a room of keen, competitive students, none of whom wanted to look like they hadn't been able to complete the assignment.</span></span><br />
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<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-41981896586312671602013-05-17T08:43:00.001-06:002013-05-17T08:44:23.951-06:00Secret pocket<br />
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<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 200%;">I'm back from my writer's train journey, and I'm working on a photo essay about the trip, but in the meantime, here is a post from my old blog, The Logogryph:</span></div>
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<span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 200%;">biking in the hot sun, legs pedalling, breath like swift waves rushing
in</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">and out, heart bumping around in its bone room,
remembering a half-waking</span> <span style="background: white;">dream last
night in which I saw one of my characters set aside some small</span> <span style="background: white;">part of herself, I can't be very clear about what this
“part” was or where it came from, it was more an idea than something concrete
that I could "see"</span> <span style="background: white;">(but then
again maybe that's what all dream images are -- ideas that hover somewhere
between physical objects and abstract concepts), she was putting part of
herself into a</span><span style="background: white;"> secret pocket, a kind of little bag like kids
put marbles in (back when kids</span> <span style="background: white;">actually
collected marbles), and when I woke up I thought well, that was a</span> <span style="background: white;">rather cliched symbol about the hidden part of
oneself, the part we don't</span> <span style="background: white;">let others see
(as often happens when one's thoughts are flooded by the</span> <span style="background: white;">aquatic emotions / impulses of the half-dreaming
state, trite ideas seem</span> <span style="background: white;">profound and
original and brimming with meaning, but quickly cool and go</span> <span style="background: white;">brittle in the cold light of waking consciousness).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">but just now, on the bike, in the heat, crossing
a busy intersection with</span> <span style="background: white;">the sun flashing
off car metal and people streaming along the sidewalks and</span> <span style="background: white;">me with my own streaming, flashing thoughts zinging
along in my head, the</span> <span style="background: white;">idea of someone
setting aside or pocketing a part of the self merged with</span> <span style="background: white;">the sensations of biking, and for a moment there were
just the sensations</span> <span style="background: white;">themselves, without
inner commentary, without past or future, and the thing</span> <span style="background: white;">kept in the pocket was Self … itself. I can’t explain
it very well at all, I’m</span> <span style="background: white;">afraid, because
it wasn’t an idea exactly. It was a momentary image with no</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">labels on it, and if I try to explain it or
conceptualize it, I’m only going</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">to kill it. But what the heck:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">There is a physical body, and a consciousness,
and a stream of</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">moment-by-moment experience, and in a secret
pocket there is a self, like a</span> <span style="background: white;">favourite
marble or an ID card or a passport. Always carry it with you</span> <span style="background: white;">because you never know when you’ll need to prove that
you are. Not who you</span> <span style="background: white;">are, but that you
are.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">And then the insight was gone. The intersection
was crossed, the passport</span> <span style="background: white;">was checked and
stamped, the thought dissolved into other thoughts, the</span> <span style="background: white;">stream flowed on and I was just me again, on my
bicycle, safely and soundly me…</span></span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-31334217809237344442013-05-07T16:39:00.001-06:002013-05-07T16:39:46.590-06:00A writer' journeyI'm away from home for a few days, on the coast to "find somewhere quiet where I can finish my book," as Bilbo tells Gandalf. I didn't even bring a computer, which is no great hardship since I brought my smartphone. But it does mean I can't post images to my blog (for some reason I can't paste my phone photos into these blog posts). So you'll just have to take my word for it that the northern BC coast is experiencing a rare week of utterly gorgeous sunny weather. Makes it hard to sit and write. But that's why I'm here. Couldn't find Rivendell in the real world so this seemed the next best thing.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-9465039206772594582013-04-26T08:08:00.003-06:002013-04-26T08:09:25.039-06:00Sauron's map of Middle-Earth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEjKZrggqqyX4yG7FyqwjVvfON4IQpbZXX0JH8-NxGS6xy0JfAEFKeMcAjSuoEZ4RZp2JoylXDMmXkq3pDiAKMuMU1tgZmKc4CMHkBBnzcRDVm1YTCErAr3Krtb33xoK-1aYDGNIBdxIQ/s1600/Sauron'sMiddleEarth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEjKZrggqqyX4yG7FyqwjVvfON4IQpbZXX0JH8-NxGS6xy0JfAEFKeMcAjSuoEZ4RZp2JoylXDMmXkq3pDiAKMuMU1tgZmKc4CMHkBBnzcRDVm1YTCErAr3Krtb33xoK-1aYDGNIBdxIQ/s400/Sauron'sMiddleEarth.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I've been reading <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>to my son, and the other day we were speculating on the question, what if Frodo had failed? What if Sauron had regained the ring? We looked at the map of Middle-Earth in the book, and one of my first thoughts was, imagine how different this map would look if evil had been victorious?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">It occurred to me that Sauron, or at least his generals and commanders, must have maps of Middle-Earth, too. What do their maps look like? How do they view the lands that we know as Gondor, Rohan, Rivendell, the Shire...? I've always loved Tolkien's maps, and I wonder if he ever speculated on this, too, or attempted to draw a map of his world from evil's perspective.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">One thing seems certain, that just as in a capitalist oligarchy of the kind that's prevalent in our world now, a victory for Mordor would mean that everything on the map would immediately be reduced to its economic significance. What resources would each conquered territory bring to the devouring imperial machine?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">So I took an existing map of Middle-Earth and made a quick, rough draft of how it might look if Mordor ruled all. If I find some time I might draw a map of Sauron's Middle-earth from scratch, with more detail, to explore this idea. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-84739905810039131472013-04-24T08:32:00.002-06:002013-04-24T22:10:50.241-06:00"This is a dream, you know."<style>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZsvjTcW-Hz63hdcU3HgNdfmisD-LnqIPjyQp1BYPCTQ4prSlD8JSWrALIw45vfDiAQBb6nSX_x9BzwNN3GCfh5Yue9Rb1AsBHH1uX8ICUafLdo6r4m8x_1aOdx0klQbC_oCCDAiczSJY/s1600/Tarkovsky-Stalker-TheHeart.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="380" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZsvjTcW-Hz63hdcU3HgNdfmisD-LnqIPjyQp1BYPCTQ4prSlD8JSWrALIw45vfDiAQBb6nSX_x9BzwNN3GCfh5Yue9Rb1AsBHH1uX8ICUafLdo6r4m8x_1aOdx0klQbC_oCCDAiczSJY/s400/Tarkovsky-Stalker-TheHeart.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">I posted a
while ago about lucid dreaming. After I’d had a few lucid dreams it occurred to
me: I could be a writer not only during waking hours, but also practice my
craft while I sleep. If, while dreaming, I could become conscious of the fact
that I was dreaming, then I could shape and direct my dreams <i>as stories. </i>I could let a plot develop,
and try different variations of it. I could invent characters and not just
write about them, but talk to them, get to know them as if they were real
people.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">This grand
plan to work as a writer both day and night turned out to be more difficult
than I’d anticipated. For one thing, first you’ve got to dream lucidly, and
that’s not easy to do at all, let alone on a regular basis. At least for me. Most nights my brain is just too tired from a
day of activity and doesn’t seem to want to be alert and inquisitive during dreaming.
It just wants to drift along with the dream and let it happen. I discovered
this in a surprising way one night when I was dreaming that I was back in grade school, which was odd in itself, but didn't make me aware I was dreaming. Then a woman came up to me
and said, “This is a dream, you know.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">I should’ve become lucid at that moment. Here was a figment of my own
subconscious inviting me to realize that I was dreaming! But I didn’t respond
to the invitation. I just nodded to the woman and sat down at my desk, and then the dream drifted on to other scenes. I was simply too far
“under” to care one way or another. Like someone sitting half-narcotized in front of
a television, my "conscious" mind just wanted to be spoon-fed and let the dream-story go where it
would. Sad to think how many people live their waking lives this way, let alone their dreaming lives.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The other
surprising thing I discovered about lucid dreaming is that trying to control
the dream doesn’t really work all that well. Unplanned events and surprises pop up no matter
how much one tries to stick to a particular story. In fact, the best thing about
lucid dreaming for a writer, it seems to me, is that the uncontrolled,
uncontrollable aspect of the mind, the “wild” mind, can add elements to your
dream-stories that you likely never would have come up with in the waking state. It’s
as if you have a collaborator, a mysterious other writer within you who comes
up with strange and wonderful ideas you almost feel you shouldn’t take credit
for.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">[Image from Tarkovsky's <i>Stalker.</i> ]</span></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-24927499754121366062013-04-22T07:12:00.001-06:002013-04-22T07:12:34.708-06:00Interview with Linda Quirk on writing young adult fantasy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/aRUVHma7ZS4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-18999667431393565062013-04-18T09:38:00.002-06:002013-04-18T09:38:51.840-06:00Plotto
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">When I heard
about this book I just had to get a copy. <i>Plotto
</i>is the work of William Wallace Cook (1867 - 1933), a prolific churner-out
of pulp novels in many genres. He was quoted as saying, “A writer is neither
better nor worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. He is a
manufacturer.” To prove his point, he created <i>Plotto</i> in the 1920’s, a book that aimed to help a writer generate
every conceivable plot for a story, built around three essential elements:
protagonist, conflict situation, and resolution. You start with an initial
situation, and then let the book’s organization guide you through various
possible plot twists and outcomes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoF7dtwjC5D-5BIF6YdStF8YCWECcx-CIG_lh1KuRpzmU53pv_M9-y5afZkYWIHuD75GyhNk4MZ0L45xB9fumQdBqTyvZ88CqGw_q5kQo89AqY4zAtO9uScl_5bVM6S3TWp1SJEKjxleg/s1600/plottopage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="335" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoF7dtwjC5D-5BIF6YdStF8YCWECcx-CIG_lh1KuRpzmU53pv_M9-y5afZkYWIHuD75GyhNk4MZ0L45xB9fumQdBqTyvZ88CqGw_q5kQo89AqY4zAtO9uScl_5bVM6S3TWp1SJEKjxleg/s400/plottopage.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Despite its
dismayingly complex-looking system of letters and numbers, the book was a huge
success, and has now been reprinted in a lovely new edition by TinHouse Books
of Orgeon. Can one still use <i>Plotto</i>
to come up with a workable plot for a story or novel? Yes, you probably can, but
one thing you quickly become aware of when using the book is that it’s also a
time machine: following its combinatorial logic takes you back to the attitudes
and mores of the time it was written, where “A” is always a male protagonist,
often struggling to succeed in order to win the love of “B,” the female
protagonist, whose stern father objects because “A” is poor... etc. It’s a
plot-world of maiden aunts and avenging wrongs and surprise inheritances and
the transgression of stratified social classes. It's an entertaining and illuminating book just to browse through, to see what was thought of as a "good story" back then.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Someone ought
to try updating the book to the 21<sup>st</sup> century. What you’d still end
up with, of course, is a catalogue for selecting prefabricated, formulaic plots. </span></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-53094151888825608302013-04-15T09:24:00.002-06:002013-04-15T09:25:10.915-06:00Once upon a shell<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">In the course on storytelling I taught this year, I challenged the students to combine text with some other medium in order to tell a story in a new or unusual way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The students responded with a wonderful burst of creativity. They put together photo essays, did spoken word performances, created a participatory storytelling game.... One student turned the classroom into a museum, complete with interactive exhibits. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another student developed his own imaginary script, based on the fanciful notion that squid communicate by way of the shapes they can make with their ink in the water. And as if that wasn't enough, he honed his understanding and facility with script-making by copying out passages from various texts in various scripts (Hebrew, Arabic, English, etc) on the shells of eggs.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheAe3YNgcAsgFmGIi1HkhgBS4CsWyxLiiRAUS10CL1RnxdGmB79PGb3_bajBbFII27QOPCBAgYQOV7HZZlt13OXA88n5819Y4N4fLpbX9ZUpLRcDkwO9enMknOtLCFGR_LwX3AFC9dyI0/s1600/EggScript2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheAe3YNgcAsgFmGIi1HkhgBS4CsWyxLiiRAUS10CL1RnxdGmB79PGb3_bajBbFII27QOPCBAgYQOV7HZZlt13OXA88n5819Y4N4fLpbX9ZUpLRcDkwO9enMknOtLCFGR_LwX3AFC9dyI0/s400/EggScript2.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Maybe this is what happens when you teach chickens to read...</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMTDOpzICChMjHOIV9h2Sne6lN1t5WQEhkNmQSd2KRc7hvcrTP7kRFLj8FR2e3pDN6GLaBpEKTLjjAy7DJR1pOPitiHwcpt0t9nhz5jJrTi11KakG-Phj9OgGfSSrptFwCXt0GLANXW4g/s1600/EggScript.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMTDOpzICChMjHOIV9h2Sne6lN1t5WQEhkNmQSd2KRc7hvcrTP7kRFLj8FR2e3pDN6GLaBpEKTLjjAy7DJR1pOPitiHwcpt0t9nhz5jJrTi11KakG-Phj9OgGfSSrptFwCXt0GLANXW4g/s400/EggScript.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I hope these pics convey something of the painstaking effort that went into this project.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_LD7f_U5GjyD-z-RpLUOeP8vj2cKDwNSLwr-fZC0xk9LEc44W8hviFSIm-bj69ka_SsU4v3Knjs71Lqa9raf222rc7rbd34zY8-eHPCKqgkY6rv4NHxjHXzijd5ndlDk2NfsX4tvE8_Y/s1600/EggScript3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_LD7f_U5GjyD-z-RpLUOeP8vj2cKDwNSLwr-fZC0xk9LEc44W8hviFSIm-bj69ka_SsU4v3Knjs71Lqa9raf222rc7rbd34zY8-eHPCKqgkY6rv4NHxjHXzijd5ndlDk2NfsX4tvE8_Y/s400/EggScript3.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Eggquisite work, isn't it? He really went ova-board with this project. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-86414668251171974572013-04-12T08:36:00.002-06:002013-04-12T08:36:47.801-06:00Popular Posts from the Past: Five Questions<br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">The other day I was looking through one
of my writing notebooks and I was struck by how many questions there
were in it. There was at least one curly little <b>?</b> on almost every
single page, and on some pages there were many. Questions about the
plot, about what the characters should do next, about other ways the
story might go, about why I’m writing this thing and what I’m trying to
say. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">It occurred to me then, looking at all
those pesky interrogative marks scattered like tiny thumbscrews across
the pages, how utterly vital questions are to any creative endeavour.
How they’re always quietly (or annoyingly) driving the work forward,
prompting one to ponder, delve, rethink, push a little harder, venture
out of the comfort zone, change course …</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">So I decided it might be a worthwhile
exercise to choose the five most useful, recurring, indispensable
questions that come up for me again and again during the writing
process. Limiting myself to only five was part of the creative challenge
of the exercise. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Rather than tenets or rules to live by, these then are my top five questions to create by:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Why?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>What else?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Really?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>WHY?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">With the exception of scientists and
three-year-olds, most of us probably don’t ask enough “why” questions in
a day. If you’ve ever been driven nuts by a kid who keeps repeating
that pesky monosyllable after every “final” answer, you’ve felt the
power of <i>Why?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> No wonder <i>Why?</i> annoys
us: it forces us to do something our easily-distracted squirrel minds
would rather avoid: to keep thinking. It’s the question that drives us
on beyond our unexamined assumptions and easy certainties. <i>Why?</i> is how I find out who my characters are and what they’re likely to do. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> While you’re at it, try
asking some of the people in your life a “why” question more often. Not
as a complaint or a rebuke, just to see what they think about something a
little deeper than what needs to go on this week’s grocery list. (Have
you ever noticed how rarely adults ask one another <i>Why?</i><i> </i></span><span style="font-size: medium;">unless they’re angry?)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><i>Why?</i> can burrow beneath the
superficial skin of daily life and reveals the hidden or forgotten
depths in those you think you know, including yourself. </span><span style="font-size: medium;"></span>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>WHAT IF…?</b></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">“What if trees had eyes?” my son
wondered the other day as we were walking to the park. That kicked my
sluggish mind into gear, as “what if” questions always do. It’s fitting
that we were on our way to a playground at the time, because that’s
what <i>What if?</i> does: it turns the real world into an infinite
playground for the imagination. It’s the world’s cheapest and most
effective de-aging solution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Okay, I’ll play: what if trees <i>did</i>
have eyes? Eyes but no mouths or arms, so they could watch whatever was
going on around them but be unable to do anything about it. Would a
lumberjack see terror in a Douglas fir’s baby blues as he approached
with his chainsaw? Or maybe trees really do have eyes. After all,
they’re photosensitive beings: they take in light through every leaf,
and use it to grow. What if we thought of a tree’s leaves as its “eyes”?
Hey, there may be a metaphor here, or a haiku: </span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">summer sun at noon</span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;"> with every single leaf </span><br />
<span style="font-size: medium;">the elm tree looks up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;">... or maybe even the seed of a whole story. Thanks, son.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>WHAT ELSE?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Related to “what if” is the less
well-known but equally powerful “what else?” The discoveries and
connections I’ll make in a day, the deepening of what’s already on the
page, will come about thanks to the mental nudging of “what else” and
its refusal to be satisfied with the easy plot device or the
pre-packaged solution. “What else,” to me, can mean many things. What
else is going on in this scene? What else does the reader need to know
to make sense of this? What else do these words imply? What else do I
have to say? Maybe nothing, but I won’t know for sure if I don’t ask.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSJbf6LbwxlgCqBd3LstetglyJ4bRZP5F_0Irvod8R0e56fnibR48V3bdoTCjYL1DsR0XSDZ_rqJ-NuiFwugfjJ3EXUwWXLxxHhnKCsaWtR8DWZDd3DZ3RwfvWFc1G5XEAwD9DjL2ZWNU/s1600/caulfield-approach.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="281" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSJbf6LbwxlgCqBd3LstetglyJ4bRZP5F_0Irvod8R0e56fnibR48V3bdoTCjYL1DsR0XSDZ_rqJ-NuiFwugfjJ3EXUwWXLxxHhnKCsaWtR8DWZDd3DZ3RwfvWFc1G5XEAwD9DjL2ZWNU/s400/caulfield-approach.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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[Illus. Sean Caulfield]<br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>WHAT’S GOING ON RIGHT NOW?</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">This question can propel me in two
different directions: both deeper into the work and out of it, back into
the unwritten world. Both are important for writing. Whenever either I
or the work-in-progress seem to have lost focus, that’s the time to
pause and ask what’s really happening at this very moment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">In terms of the writing, it’s a way of
regrounding myself in the sensory, the immediate, the palpable urgencies
of whatever place or situation my characters are in here and now. The
question compels me to step inside the story and look around, to see,
touch, hear, taste and smell this imaginary world I’m building out of
words. And doing that reengages me with the story and the beings in it,
and often shows me the way to go forward, from <i>right now</i> into the <i>very next thing</i> that should happen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> But “What’s going on right
now?” is also useful in one’s own life outside the page. I think a lot
of people never finish (or begin) that novel they’ve always planned to
write because they can’t stay put long enough in <i>right now</i>. It’s
where everything happens, of course, but most of us avoid it whenever
possible: it’s much easier to live in the past or dream of the great
work we’re going to do tomorrow, yes, definitely tomorrow, because today
we just don’t feel like it...</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> There are times, of course,
when it is best to let the work sit for a while and do something else
(for five minutes, an hour, a day, a year…?). And asking myself what’s
going on right now can help me understand when that’s the right thing to
do. The question regrounds me in my own here and now, reminding me that
the flesh is mortal and one can only accomplish so much in a day. So
get up and stretch, the dog is whining to be let out, go play with the
kids, take your long-suffering spouse to dinner at a fancy restaurant.
The miraculous thing is that while you’re doing that, your mind will
still be working, dreaming, forging unexpected links and taking
audacious leaps across synapses, and then, just when you’ve completely
forgotten about that problem you sweated over for hours, the answer
comes, as if out of nowhere. (When really it comes from all the stuff
going on inside you that’s not accessible to the prefrontal cortex.
You’re not in control of everything, you know). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>REALLY?</b></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">This one is the wet rag, the snarky
teenager, the sober second opinion. “Cast a cold eye on life, on death,”
Yeats said, and it’s good advice for anyone riding the exhilarating
windhorse of creativity. He could have added, “cast a cold eye on your
deathless creations, too.” That’s what <i>Really?</i> is for. I’m sure
I’ve just penned the most magnificent pages the world will ever have the
great fortune to read, but the next morning, once the high has worn
off, I had better take another look. Once you’ve won the Booker you will
never need to doubt your own brilliance again, but until then… </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Still, like the other four, this is a
dangerous question. It can easily be overused or asked at the wrong
stage in the creative process, since it comes from the Critic-Within,
that jaded gremlin who will choke off one’s imaginative flow if given
too much time and power over the work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> And like “What’s going on
right now?”, the cold eye of “Really?” can be usefully turned on the
unwritten world too, and cast at every glossy sales pitch, every last
word on the subject, every politician who spins us a golden tale of
better days ahead. And once we’ve asked it, we might find ourselves
returning full circle to that other question that comes in handy
whenever we’re told, by ourselves or others, That’s Just the Way Things
Are:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"> Why?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEija1mN63tNDSjfRitBLf98HG7Q-ZAbIURmVHppTRwyEeLzSFKRLeIoqWJgl4ud9_IkXYva58Nfp-edL6-1PtMoJSrY7UjBA6Mm4XJPDd3TMlW_GVhrwNNYdpvwsiC7BiDrkQpZdCRb37s/s1600/CoyoteDetail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEija1mN63tNDSjfRitBLf98HG7Q-ZAbIURmVHppTRwyEeLzSFKRLeIoqWJgl4ud9_IkXYva58Nfp-edL6-1PtMoJSrY7UjBA6Mm4XJPDd3TMlW_GVhrwNNYdpvwsiC7BiDrkQpZdCRb37s/s320/CoyoteDetail.jpg" width="283" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>One more thing</b>: don’t forget to
say thanks once in a while. To God, or the muse, or the right cerebral
cortex of the human brain, or whatever mystical or biological source you
believe your great ideas ultimately come from. No one creates anything
in a vacuum. Whether there’s an Author behind it all or not, it seems
pretty clear to me that this universe is an unfinished, always
astonishing act of creativity. Just look at a lilac bush, or a giraffe.
The universe came up with stars, galaxies, planets, life, and then it
really got going and dreamed up a being that could create universes
inside its own head, share them with others, and change the way things
are. That’s creativity, and it’s in everyone, and belongs to everyone,
so here’s one more question: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b>What are you doing with it? </b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b> </b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><b> </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><b> </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-8011386425420324312013-04-10T11:09:00.000-06:002013-04-10T11:09:57.651-06:00A Journey to Both Poles At the Same Time<style>
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<div class="Style1" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;">(part of a story told
to me over coffee one day)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;">“… So before they
knocked me out to put the screws in my ankle, I felt some part of me, my awareness
or conscious mind, leaving my body. I was able to float up to a corner of the
emergency room and look around at everything, even my own body lying there on
the stretcher, with all the blood and everything. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;"></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzo80A05U1jmB4UpoQrptYNs3NVWdX1lchcw3s9RSSw0A8D_Qt5cCJCHuM2WkVVmlIABekWJRZdRkNdC562gHKIWei0lIGX2tqPfAjFLRMUaUMjUu3IGEU_ZILHrr3fqdvQVZQ31QyLR8/s1600/operating-room-02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzo80A05U1jmB4UpoQrptYNs3NVWdX1lchcw3s9RSSw0A8D_Qt5cCJCHuM2WkVVmlIABekWJRZdRkNdC562gHKIWei0lIGX2tqPfAjFLRMUaUMjUu3IGEU_ZILHrr3fqdvQVZQ31QyLR8/s400/operating-room-02.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;">It wasn’t scary really; it
seemed perfectly natural. I thought, <i>Oh,
man, I’ve become one of those New Age nutflakes you see on paranormal reality
TV. </i>After a while, though, it was like I was able to see even further than
the room. My sight went out into the streets of the city, into the hills, up
the rivers past towns and villages, into the high mountains, into put it but I
felt like everything was aware, everything was <i>conscious</i> all around me and within me. Even rocks and clouds and
stuff like that. Like I could read the <i>mind</i>
of all living things. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;"></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidPiJmrrvRGSX84qKgZkn66ckR6LbK4sF46gVdqI5fNlnD5Npw8BkU1o6h3BMMlY9G0IUfWHDCq-e6XuGNTmC0xfXTnaO9upstpnbHgXXXw5syDdzRlcI2ZjjI1_C3ba7itbzaNW72aJE/s1600/wings-of-desire1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidPiJmrrvRGSX84qKgZkn66ckR6LbK4sF46gVdqI5fNlnD5Npw8BkU1o6h3BMMlY9G0IUfWHDCq-e6XuGNTmC0xfXTnaO9upstpnbHgXXXw5syDdzRlcI2ZjjI1_C3ba7itbzaNW72aJE/s400/wings-of-desire1.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;">Then I got scared, but I was excited too. Exhilarated. I
thought, now I’m going to get an answer to one of my biggest questions. You
see, I’d always felt there was some deep hidden meaning to the fact that the
poles of our universe are inaccessible. I don’t mean the north and south poles
of the planet, I mean the poles of the large and of the small in our universe. The
extremely vast and the extremely tiny. I call them poles because we’re like the
explorers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so desperately trying to
reach these untrodden places and claim them as our own. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2G_G_OBVKwIEeEZ7H5GljufkdiO7idb9f_EtFyClwWR_nMRn7zR4emapFCmMVz8oQREhavhNeFTe5Mw_pEBjswIbatWGnUfvGYNDoQ7wcRoBYJK3bjSuEIOK3pIEhQpvwNmBU4jBDLRk/s1600/Blizzard_(AAE_1911-14).jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2G_G_OBVKwIEeEZ7H5GljufkdiO7idb9f_EtFyClwWR_nMRn7zR4emapFCmMVz8oQREhavhNeFTe5Mw_pEBjswIbatWGnUfvGYNDoQ7wcRoBYJK3bjSuEIOK3pIEhQpvwNmBU4jBDLRk/s400/Blizzard_(AAE_1911-14).jpeg" width="400" /> </a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;">Looking up, we can see
no end to the cosmos. Our instruments can’t reach the pole of the vast and probably
they never will. And looking within, we can only get so far in our measurements
of the tiniest components of matter. We don’t even really know <i>what</i> they are. So the pole of the vanishingly
small is also out of reach. Why should it be like that? That’s what I always
wondered, ever since I was a teenager and I watched scientists like Carl Sagan
on television. Why are we precisely <i>here,</i>
on this perceptual equator, you might say, poised midway between the infinite
and the infinitesimal? Anyhow, in that moment before the anesthetic took me under, I felt as if all I had to do
was exert a little more effort and I would be able to touch both poles, the
vast and the small. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHkfq8vzWU_p2HUpuNeR8ifyByIU7q9vvzD3BhJ39dOsbh5HpLFPsfpE3xdpLzmpSKz6vVXyIRtgnYOOB3YFR2qf0sdFn0bhvxBnj1dTK-8k_VfQ88YgLcAAOOnJz7vS77wQ5sFZXTsZo/s1600/boxboy.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHkfq8vzWU_p2HUpuNeR8ifyByIU7q9vvzD3BhJ39dOsbh5HpLFPsfpE3xdpLzmpSKz6vVXyIRtgnYOOB3YFR2qf0sdFn0bhvxBnj1dTK-8k_VfQ88YgLcAAOOnJz7vS77wQ5sFZXTsZo/s400/boxboy.jpeg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;">I would see and understand the design, if there was one, the
purpose behind the inaccessibility that drives us on, keeps us searching, the
purpose behind everything. I would understand everything in nature, or maybe I
would <i>be</i> everything in nature. Every
creature, every rock, every molecule, every galaxy. Every particle of matter
and energy. I would no longer know, I would simply be, or <i>it</i> would simply be. Suddenly I was terrified. Absolutely terrified.
If I made that final effort, I knew it would annihilate the person I had always
been. Over and gone. Gone where? Who knows. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHtl-0mRyB0bKyOzGx_3tmwEYrMUTe9knPsIOWxKsU4W1oerTq3DANnCjhJqvoPvzejJFPkQbRf4QW1mvWKHFrdixR1KmYhyIuDpN3l1t7KnyQklttZUbzJKAAte5QDI0oV9rK1g-TkNc/s1600/HesOnFire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="340" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHtl-0mRyB0bKyOzGx_3tmwEYrMUTe9knPsIOWxKsU4W1oerTq3DANnCjhJqvoPvzejJFPkQbRf4QW1mvWKHFrdixR1KmYhyIuDpN3l1t7KnyQklttZUbzJKAAte5QDI0oV9rK1g-TkNc/s400/HesOnFire.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
<br />
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;"></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Cambria; line-height: 200%;">But still I could not tear myself
away. I was toppling over the edge. It wasn’t even a matter of my own effort
anymore, it was simply going to happen. I was going to be standing at both
poles at the same time, and maybe, maybe they were actually one and the same
place…. Well, as it happened, sleepytime kicked in and solved the dilemma for me.
I went under, and woke up a couple of hours later, groggy and extremely
thirsty, but sane, at least relatively. I told myself it was just a
hallucination brought on by the drugs in my system, and maybe that’s the truth
of it, but still it was … unforgettable. And okay maybe it’s silly, but you
know, sometimes I like to pride myself on having gone farther, deeper, than anyone -- Magellan,
Marco Polo, Newton, Scott, Amundsen, Armstrong -- has ever gone.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVIU4IVdLv9bkW8js7E8qBFgBg8O-I1Egd_xUVgH_VAocInBpQTkgbjfKUZkpyanJ8jDDwjjB2cbPMzuHHrGgMwZ0pF-d1PaYe-HiqqY7RkXqRT7UOIHY_Z73XFW6trZD4yIjcJB9SKAI/s1600/Child+alone+on+beach.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVIU4IVdLv9bkW8js7E8qBFgBg8O-I1Egd_xUVgH_VAocInBpQTkgbjfKUZkpyanJ8jDDwjjB2cbPMzuHHrGgMwZ0pF-d1PaYe-HiqqY7RkXqRT7UOIHY_Z73XFW6trZD4yIjcJB9SKAI/s400/Child+alone+on+beach.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-51058992276520133272013-04-08T07:51:00.000-06:002013-04-08T07:51:26.047-06:00Hamlet dies?
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW0DgA-gCLOjCUQUoqWYiVgkZYO5s8FPbDKIXQrHMhTCgwNzfu4yHEWWJr1qSR-39yWLtLMnSiKytcCwqAB4TfVMhLEKMhAvA5SiHtfoCoUHlTO38gMw9zRxvX-mf3DToh2BgGmdOiqvE/s1600/hamletsouthpark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW0DgA-gCLOjCUQUoqWYiVgkZYO5s8FPbDKIXQrHMhTCgwNzfu4yHEWWJr1qSR-39yWLtLMnSiKytcCwqAB4TfVMhLEKMhAvA5SiHtfoCoUHlTO38gMw9zRxvX-mf3DToh2BgGmdOiqvE/s400/hamletsouthpark.jpg" width="328" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I haven’t blogged in over a week because my Mac failed and
it took me a while to get it fixed. One day it just wouldn’t start -- all I got
was the Grey Screen of Indeterminacy. Eventually the problem was solved -- a
cable inside the machine had failed and was easily replaced. But in the
meantime I got sick, and that, combined with no computer, kept me from writing
anything -- or feeling like writing anything -- for this blog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So now I’ve got the Mac back and I’m feeling better, too, but
after almost two weeks with no blogging I discover I’ve gotten out of the habit
and I have no ideas, no inspiration. I’m sitting at the table yesterday evening
with a blank word document staring me in the face, and my son comes home from
his job at a restaurant and I say, “Conor, I need an idea for a blog post. You
got anything?” </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">He thinks it over, and says, “You should blog about how no
one reads books anymore.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“I can’t blog about that,” I say, “because it isn’t true.
People still read books. Maybe more books than ever now.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">That gets him started on his English class. They’ve been
studying <i>Hamlet.</i> He hates the play.
Absolutely hates it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“There must be a reason why it’s the most famous play in the
history of English literature,” I say. “There must be <i>something</i> you liked about it.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">He ponders that. He liked Horatio’s line “Good night, sweet
prince,” but only because John Goodman’s character quotes it in the movie <i>The Big Lebowski, </i>so now he knows where
the line originally came from.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anything else? He mulls it over and his face brightens and he says he likes the fact
that the play has flaws in it. He grew up believing <i>Hamlet </i>is this GREAT<i> </i>work he should be in awe of, and it was a surprise to discover that there are some really dumb things in it.
Like the fact that Hamlet doesn’t do <i>anything
</i>for half the play, even though he believes his uncle killed his father, and
then when he suddenly decides to act, he kills the wrong guy, stabbing Polonius
through the arras. I agree with him. It’s not a perfect play, whatever a
perfect play might be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Conor goes on to talk about reading the play out loud in
class, and how half the students can’t even pronounce the words that are still
current in English, let alone the Elizabethan words they’ve never seen before.
It’s painful, he says, to listen to them stumble over their lines. And then
there were the two girls who missed a class and asked Conor to tell them what
happened at the end of the play. He told them the ending and they were shocked.
</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Hamlet <i>dies?</i> But he’s the <i>hero</i>.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There’s something almost hopeful about that kind of
ignorance. To not know how the most famous play in the English language ends. So
that you can discover it for yourself, with no preconceptions. Which means that it still
has the power to shock and captivate readers. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I remember when I first read <i>Hamlet</i> in high school. I didn’t much care for it either. The language was just so
hard. A few years later I read it again, for a university class, and I heard something I
recognized in Hamlet’s speeches, something familiar and close to home despite
the antiquated language. I heard someone speaking of doubt and indecision and
pointlessness. Someone who didn’t know what his place was in the world, or why
he was here at all, or what he should do with his life. The voice of someone
who could have lived in my own time. Someone who could be me.</span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-78302003258368097182013-03-26T08:39:00.001-06:002013-03-26T08:39:35.405-06:00Crazy talk<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdsPst0ZFK7DUPZTLdL_K2IlEm68T0uK5k3M6kWTCkJJcmR4DMBY4SRicErpZvGQurVu9MlOScZuZ3UuL1ydzq3j7y-eAkzGXjN9GUNIIOKy_KPfF0HAeuZAQ_MWCeTIs6d2171layrYQ/s1600/carl+jung.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdsPst0ZFK7DUPZTLdL_K2IlEm68T0uK5k3M6kWTCkJJcmR4DMBY4SRicErpZvGQurVu9MlOScZuZ3UuL1ydzq3j7y-eAkzGXjN9GUNIIOKy_KPfF0HAeuZAQ_MWCeTIs6d2171layrYQ/s400/carl+jung.jpg" width="298" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Stories are everywhere these days. In science, medicine, art, therapy, politics ... all of these fields have recognized the power and the value of both listening to and telling stories.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It seems to me that this emphasis on stories as vehicles of learning and understanding can be traced in part to the work of Carl Jung. As he notes in his autobiography, <i>Memory, Dreams, Reflections,</i> when he first got his start in psychiatry, the standard procedure was to <i>type</i> patients by their outward behaviour, to assign them to a predetermined category of mental illness and then diagnose treatment. </span><span style="font-size: large;">Jung developed a different approach, one that seems self-evident today. He was one of the first psychoanalysts to recognize that
what his patients were actually telling him about themselves -- their
lives, their dreams, their "crazy talk" -- was important. He was one of the first to listen to their stories.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Jung believed that the human personality desired to evolve out of unconscious processes towards an experience of wholeness and awareness that he called individuation. He noted that "I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem."</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Where the language of science can't or won't go, what language is there? The language of Story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
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<br /><div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-90764214424870548822013-03-21T09:32:00.002-06:002013-03-23T21:43:54.380-06:00Jump<style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj36Sg6VTEYBTX8ZSrai_WkUMMOZqYV3LKS0bMwa_YdQgbMh89b0J1mJwi-XIi_4y3fg8nz2SRcHPWIo-80DGlShCtjtIxy-7lt2y5AilKz5Wgo1IvI7h79-WZ5O0OPI_8hg0xF-Ua-QkU/s1600/lakejump.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj36Sg6VTEYBTX8ZSrai_WkUMMOZqYV3LKS0bMwa_YdQgbMh89b0J1mJwi-XIi_4y3fg8nz2SRcHPWIo-80DGlShCtjtIxy-7lt2y5AilKz5Wgo1IvI7h79-WZ5O0OPI_8hg0xF-Ua-QkU/s400/lakejump.jpg" width="260" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Waves. Standing at the edge of the red rock. They’re shouting
at me. <i>Jump</i>. My toes at the very edge, curling over. Claw toes. Can’t see into the slip slap flashing water. Waves. <i>Jump.</i>
The waves from the motorboat skier slapping the rock. Tow rope flash. Waves bulling in slip slap white. Wind gust. Cold. Claw. Goosebumps. Dog barking. Black dog. Champ. Been getting
loose. Coming over to our cabin all summer. Ugly dog. Owph owph. Wants to
play. When did you last eat? They’re shouting
at me. <i>Jump. </i>Been half an hour at least don't worry Mom. Shouting. Heads bobbing coconuts in the slip
slap green. Can’t see down into the water. Just three four heads on the surface. Which is Ari? She calls me cuz. Her
eyes. Flashing sky blue. Hey cuz. Flash of slip slap sky of clouds. Skier still up hanging on over rough waves. <i><br /></i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Jump. </i> </span></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Lost the spare cabin key. Had it in my jeans
pocket. Dad freaked. His book. Saving the planet's water. His life work. Jesus you kids! No
peace even out here! His papers spilling on the floor. When did you. Made
me look for it. When did you last see it? Don't remember. You never remember! <i>Jump. </i>Buzzing far. Motorboat gunning pulling skier still. Waves spreading out. That first night around the campfire. Sparks. She leaned against me. Then Dad pointing up at the stars. We're alone. No one else. No god, no mothership coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Jump. </i> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Red rock goes down sheer into the deep green dark jelly cold water, down down to where? Owph owph. Can’t they
take better care of that thing? Ari said Champ likes you cuz. Why? Just cuz, cuz. Laughing. Her eyes. Last night’s dream. Slimy muscled
thing. Crawling out of the lake. No eyes in its head. Hungry. Got up cold looked out
window lace saw moonshiver on water through trees spruce arms clawing wind no sight
no sound. Nothing to be afraid of. <i>Jump. </i>Ari said something in
her sleep. <i>Look in the</i><i>. </i>In the what? Couldn't hear the word through the wall. <i> </i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Jump. </i></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Summer almost
over. Tomorrow. Mom packing. Dad’s papers still. One more day. One more chance. The key. My jeans. Scrambling out of them on the shore yesterday. Must have fallen. <i>Look in the</i><i>. </i>I’m looking in now can’t see
anything in the flash of spill of water how far down? Water spilling sliding motor rumbling down now quieter, why? <i>Jump. </i>Skier not there
anymore just waves spreading out and boat slowing turning can’t see but I have to. <i>Jump. </i>The key. Must. <i>Jump. </i>Because.<i> </i>Ari. <i>Jump. </i>Have to. <i>Jump.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>[image from http://dockjumping.wordpress.com/tag/canada/]</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i></span> </div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-56329792270492198582013-03-19T07:35:00.002-06:002013-03-19T07:35:30.701-06:00Writing on Stone
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">One of my
favourite places on the planet is Writing-on-Stone historic site, in the extreme south
of the province. It’s a magnificent landscape, first of all, with a view across
the Milk River of the Sweetgrass Hills of Montana rising out of the plain. At
sunrise and sunset in this valley the colours of the bands of rock strata rock
light up and glow with an otherworldly beauty.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">And then
there are the petroglyphs and pictographs, the drawings and paintings on the
faces of the rock. The Blackfoot call this place Áísínai’pi, meaning “it is
written” (or “it is pictured”). Aboriginal people see this valley as a home to
powerful spirits, and many of the carvings in the rock depict encounters with
these beings. But the carvings also commemorate historical events, such as the
arrival of horses and Europeans to the area.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">When Sharon
and I first visited here, before we were married, we arrived on a sizzling hot
day, the heatsink of summer in southern Alberta. We nearly ran over a
rattlesnake (well, a snake, anyhow) basking in the middle of the road. We were
parched, but as we were camping in a tent on the flats, there was little relief
from the heat. We clambered among the rocks, marveling at the art we found. I
saw a figure with its arms raised to the sky, and over its head a line in an
arc, like a rainbow. I didn’t take a picture of it, and I’ve never seen it
reproduced in any articles or websites that I’ve found since about the
park.<span> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">In the
evening, a huge dark wall of cloud rose in the west. Briefly the clouds broke and
sunset fell across the world like a path of gold. We could see the tiny shapes of pronghorn
antelope dotting the plain, miles away, like stars. Then the clouds closed back
in and that night a torrential rainstorm was unleashed on the valley. Our tent
was flooded and nearly washed away. It looked as if we’d managed to camp in a
dried-up creekbed. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The next
morning, cold, soaked and miserable, we left the park and stopped for gas in
the nearby town of Milk River. The attendant, an older man, said they hadn’t
had a storm like that here for years. Which was more proof to us that we should
hire ourselves out as rainmakers, since wherever we go when we’re tenting, no
matter how unlikely the chance of precipitation, there’s sure to be a downpour.
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">I came back
to Writing-on-Stone years later with a writer friend. This time we took a
guided tour with a group of other visitors. The guide showed us some of the
rock art, and told us what was known about it. He also carefully explained that
the art, while it might look crude by contemporary standards, was not meant to be
representational but was highly symbolic and stylized, as much a <i>script</i> as it was pictorial. Hence the
name <i>Writing</i> on Stone. This idea
didn’t sink in with one of the other tourists, who pondered the carvings with
the rest of us and then, at the end of the tour, loudly gave his verdict: “Man,
them Indians sure couldn’t draw good.”</span></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-7584398874797364132013-03-18T07:07:00.001-06:002013-03-18T13:03:42.267-06:00The storyteller is the story<style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrPsO6jWhcX83IH1DGgohdSE21NfMi8yoP-dHY2vs0zaywVPCxwZeD4rVqszCTowYLIe4KfmeDaKULX4yXphWLTG7gcAPLPbOJJ0JBlMhuZywt-UtP8QKLzx3qwt4rOOa9itPWogzIcb4/s1600/corblokgandalf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrPsO6jWhcX83IH1DGgohdSE21NfMi8yoP-dHY2vs0zaywVPCxwZeD4rVqszCTowYLIe4KfmeDaKULX4yXphWLTG7gcAPLPbOJJ0JBlMhuZywt-UtP8QKLzx3qwt4rOOa9itPWogzIcb4/s400/corblokgandalf.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">This image by
the Dutch artist Cor Blok shows Gandalf (the White, after his death and
resurrection) relating the story of his battle with the balrog to Aragorn,
Legolas and Gimli. On the wizard’s body one can see various episodes from his
chase and struggle with the balrog, from the lowest depths of Moria, where
strange creatures dwell in the darkness, up the Endless Stair, to the highest
peak of Silvertine. Gandalf’s conical hat doubles as the peak on which he
wrestles with his enemy and finally casts him down, after which he is rescued
by the eagle Gwaihir the Windlord.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">When I first
encountered Blok’s illustrations for Tolkien’s work, I wasn’t sure what to
think of them. They’re not at all in the heroic mode of artists like the
Brothers Hildebrandt, which was the art I first encountered on calendars and
the like when I first fell in love with Tolkien’s work in the 1970’s. I liked
illustrations that matched the grand, epic feel of the book. Blok’s work looked
a little too, well, childish.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">It was this
particular image that won me over to Blok’s vision of <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>. It’s a vision that doesn’t try to illustrate
so much as suggest. And what this particular image suggests to me is the
archetypal figure of the Storyteller. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">There’s a
truth about storytelling depicted here: that the story and the storyteller are
really one. A story is not something a storyteller just spins out of nothing,
or reels off like a tape recorder. Storytellers carry their stories with them,
sometimes for many years, and the shape and events of their lives help to shape
their stories. The same story told by three different storytellers would of
course become three very different stories. Just as a dancer is her dance, a
storyteller is his stories. And this is true of all of us, even if we don’t
think of ourselves as storytellers.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">For me, the
fact that my stories are part of me, physically, is most obvious when the story
I have to tell is a difficult or painful one. At those times, like Gandalf
wrestling with the balrog, I can feel myself, my body, struggling to get the
story out. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Try this: the
next time someone tells you a story, even if it’s just an “ordinary” story
about the odd encounter they had on the bus this morning, or the dumb thing
their cat did yesterday, pay close attention to how the person’s body
contributes to the telling: facial expressions, gestures, movements. Sometimes you notice that the story the person is telling with their words is not at all the same story their body is telling. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The
next time you tell someone a story, notice where in your body the story seems
to be coming from -- it might not be just from inside your head.</span></span><br />
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-29688374648388514092013-03-15T07:24:00.002-06:002013-04-18T12:38:35.599-06:00Camping<style>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrzWo0B4zFTj7NVu8BhEG3LSXyb50OlC8gy-Jw2_L4vdhivmjicXuGD-Fxu4VuE7K4v8YiS8XSSZTXRORTh-K_qaopA5P7knynHOOZIhj3hr7RFNyhor2tVgTF-BrY_qqtBtITzOwTHMo/s1600/Tent+in+Jasper+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrzWo0B4zFTj7NVu8BhEG3LSXyb50OlC8gy-Jw2_L4vdhivmjicXuGD-Fxu4VuE7K4v8YiS8XSSZTXRORTh-K_qaopA5P7knynHOOZIhj3hr7RFNyhor2tVgTF-BrY_qqtBtITzOwTHMo/s400/Tent+in+Jasper+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: large;">On a stretch of flat
scrubby ground along the Miette River, just outside of town, the park authorities
had set aside space for travelers passing through Jasper who could not afford
campground fees. The free camp, as it was known, had become a gathering place
for young people with nowhere to go, drifters, wanna-be Jack Kerouacs,
drop-outs, and potheads. We called them <i>shrubs</i>.
The shaggy, scrawny boys with guitars and no shirts. The fever-eyed, barefooted
girls you would sometimes see at the grocery store,
slipping packages of sandwich meat into their woven shoulder
bags (the girls were apparently sent in to do the shoplifting because they were less likely to raise suspicion and get caught).</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">The free camp was a
place that the kids who lived in Jasper talked about with a kind of fear and
fascination. You didn’t go out there unless you were looking for adventure, or
trouble, or dope. One evening a friend who’d been to the camp talked some of us
who hadn’t into going with him. If we were lucky, our friend said, one of the shrubs would share
a joint with us. We could get high. Most of us had never done that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We didn’t
find anyone smoking pot, or willing to share it with us. But we sat and talked
for a while with a guy named Rob who was idly strumming a guitar. Rob looked
like Jesus. Like the Ted Neely Jesus. He had the long hair, the little beard, a laid-back, amiable
manner. Rob never smoked pot or took any drugs, or so he said (he seemed to understand that’s why we had come here in the first place). He told us that he would
never use any artificial means of heightening consciousness, since, if a person
really paid attention, they would know that one’s consciousness was already, always, heightened.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">He had been
a physics grad student at CalTech, and now he was traveling the continent.
Everything is friction, he said. The contact of surfaces, generating heat,
light, sound, all of the information we get about the world around us. But this
information comes at a price, since something always gets lost as a result of
friction. Surfaces wear down. Heat dissipates into the surround. The signal
degrades. Things fall apart. Only one thing in the universe can act on
everything else without friction of any kind. </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“Do you
know what that is?” he asked us. We wracked our brains. We didn’t know.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“The mind,”
Rob said. </span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">He talked a
lot about the mind then, and I don’t remember most of it, because I didn’t get
most of it. He may have mentioned William Blake. I don't remember for sure. But he did say one thing, just before we left, that stuck with me.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“You know,”
he said, “we’re all camping. All of us. You, me, everyone.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">We asked
him what he meant. Again we didn’t get it.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“We’re just
camping,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and smiling his Jesus smile. “Some of us stay in the same spot for a long time, but a
house isn’t any different from a tent. Not really. You’re just borrowing that
spot for a while, from nature. From the universe. And one day you’ve got to move on.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: large;">A few years later the park authorities closed the free camp because of its reputation as a drug hang-out. It never reopened.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-53403196972424788322013-03-11T09:03:00.001-06:002013-03-11T22:35:32.785-06:00The Darkness: A Love Story<style>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo_E_qm06pzNZfkb1XtOulJ1wE7syxgr9RQ9VeqL7v99QuEaQEF4hcFPoAoW-jkvop59HjAKlNrp5KLU1h9bDlSbqSYj2dMFxjMFIP7Fs9OiZB4UTs-TrZGBOrn4ry5_u03iAcTPabA4Y/s1600/britishcab2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo_E_qm06pzNZfkb1XtOulJ1wE7syxgr9RQ9VeqL7v99QuEaQEF4hcFPoAoW-jkvop59HjAKlNrp5KLU1h9bDlSbqSYj2dMFxjMFIP7Fs9OiZB4UTs-TrZGBOrn4ry5_u03iAcTPabA4Y/s400/britishcab2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">What if
tonight, when you’re scared and alone, with one arm hanging off the edge of your
bed, the darkness reaches up and holds your hand?</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">What if,
instead of pulling back in fear, you hold onto the hand of darkness, and you
tug. And what if you drag the darkness out from underneath the bed. It
struggles and kicks, but you don’t let go. You drag it up onto your bed and
throw your arms around it so that it can’t escape. You can hear both your heart
and its heart pounding in fear but you don’t let go. And finally the darkness
gives up the struggle and goes quiet.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i><span style="line-height: 150%;">Why did you touch my hand?</span></i><span style="line-height: 150%;"> you demand, trying to keep the fear
out of your voice. <i>Why are you always
lurking down there, trying to scare the hell out of me?</i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The darkness
doesn’t answer. Instead, it reaches out a hand you cannot see and touches your
face. It’s a gentle, hesitant touch. The fingers of the darkness are cold, but
not with malice, you realize. They are cold with fear, and longing.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The hand of
the darkness moves again, takes your hand gently, and moves it to its own
heart. You feel its heart beating frantically against your
palm. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><i>Heart of darkness,</i> you think. Like that story you had to read in high school, about the crazy guy up a river in Africa. You didn't get that story. Why did the guy have to go up a river to find darkness? You can find it anywhere. Like under your bed.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">But that was before. When you thought darkness was your enemy. You know now what the darkness has felt all these nights, huddled under
your bed, alone and longing and waiting but terrified also that this night would come. This night when
you would finally meet face to face and the darkness would be forced to confess how it really
feels about you. How much it needs you.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">You pull your
hand away. You’re afraid again, but not the same way as you were before. You
want the darkness gone. You want it back where it was before, when it was the unknown. When it was the place you could fill with everything you were afraid of. And the darkness knows this. It moves away from you. It stands
beside your bed, with no face that you can see. No eyes. No sign that you can read to tell you how it's feeling. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">There’s a low
rumbling from the darkness beyond the darkness. Then a pair of dim lights
appear and grow. A vehicle of shadows pulls up beside your bed and stops. On
its roof is a glowing silver disk, and on its side, in phosphorescent letters,
the word Nightcab.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">The darkness
climbs into the backseat and the Nightcab drives off. You’re still sitting in
your bed, and there’s light coming in through the window. A grey light, like
dirty dishwater. It will be morning very soon. Time to get up and get ready for work.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-11080526221007198202013-03-07T08:02:00.001-07:002013-03-07T08:02:54.877-07:00The Council of Elrond
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">I’ve read <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>
now to all three of my kids, one after the other. Or I should say, I’ve started to read the book to them, but
with all three, the reading got stalled at the same chapter. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">I want to say that I <i>love</i>
reading Tolkien’s work out loud. I enjoy giving each character a particular
vocal style or accent. I like the way that reading out loud makes me slow down
and appreciate the careful, loving craft and thought that went into this story.
And I love declaiming Tolkien’s beautifully-crafted, powerful sentences. Many
of which can be found in the particular chapter in question, where I get to do many different voices.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;"><span></span>Yes, I'm talking about “The Council of
Elrond.” A very long chapter that describes a meeting. That’s right, the thing that most people hate more than just about anything at their
jobs: meetings. Tolkien has a lot of backstory to get through, and a lot of characters to introduce. And he has to do it in a scene where a bunch of noble, long-winded adults sit around and talk. And talk. And talk.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">To Tolkien’s
credit I think this chapter is magnificent. The language is eloquent, ringing,
rousing. The chapter is structured, too, in such a way as to only reveal a
little bit at a time, keeping a reader engaged and wanting to know more, and
also building slowly and inexorably to the fundamental problem that this
meeting is meant to address: what to do with the ring, and who is going to do it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">If Middle
Earth was like our world, before long the central purpose of the meeting would have
been diverted into unhelpful channels by those insisting on having their own
agenda heard, no matter how unrelated it is to the matter at hand. People would
get restless, annoyed, bored. Eventually Elrond would have to call for a
subcommittee or focus group to look into the problem of what to do about the
ring. Then there would be a motion to continue the discussion on another day
and everyone would flee back to their cubicles to scarf down a compensatory donut.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Anyhow, the
challenge with reading this book to my kids was always to get them past “The
Council of Elrond.” Children have no use for a bunch of adults, especially
serious, noble, long-winded adults, sitting around talking about important
stuff. My two older kids didn’t make it past this chapter. It reduced them to a
state of catatonia. The reading ground to a halt somewhere around Gandalf’s
long story of how he escaped from Saruman, and we never continued. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">My third and
youngest (hmm, just like in the fairy tales?) made it all the way through “The
Council of Elrond” with me. I was surprised. I was thrilled. Then he announced he didn’t want to
read the book anymore. Disappointed, I didn’t say much. I’d learned to bide my
time with this one and not insist on my own agenda. Sure enough, a little later he
told me that we could keep reading the book, if I really wanted to. You know, as a favour to me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">So we’ll
carry on. And we should be good. Until we get to Treebeard…</span></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7836598088279339968.post-5196346495540179142013-03-05T07:22:00.000-07:002013-03-23T21:35:22.831-06:00Strangers on a plane<style>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">On a long plane flight you spend hours in close proximity with people you
don’t know. You may exchange a few words with some of them (“excuse me”, “thank
you” etc), and sometimes you strike up a real conversation with someone, but
most of these strangers remain complete strangers. Except for their faces.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">On a long flight people get up from their seats a lot, to go to the bathroom, to exercise
atrophying muscles, to look at something other than the back of the seat ahead
of them. Some passengers spend most of a flight standing in the aisle, chatting
with each other or with the flight attendants. As a result you get familiar
with their faces, and a few of these faces stand out as more interesting, or
bothersome, than others. Sometimes because of uncommon beauty, or uncommon ugliness.
Or something else that intrigues you. A face that suggests nobility. Intensity.
A haunted look. A face of complete vacancy. There are faces you compulsively
return to for another look, sometimes to the point where they cease being faces
altogether and become invested with your own private meanings that their owners
could never guess at. You make up stories about the life lived by the owner of
that particular face. An attractive face stands in for the allure of the <i>elsewhere</i> that you’re headed for. A face
that repels or irritates you comes to represent the tedium and discomfort
you’re enduring to reach that <i>elsewhere</i>
(and thus there’s a special pang seeing the owner of one of these “tedium” faces
getting through customs ahead of you, <i>free</i>,
while you’re still stuck in transitland). The obvious remedy, of course, is to
glance behind you and see one of those faces even further than you from the
portals of liberty. And about the time you start doing that, you also realize
how petty and mean-spirited one can get after an entire day of air travel. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Of course you can have the same experience on other forms of
transportation. On our honeymoon, Sharon and I went to Ireland. On the west
coast we took the ferry to the Aran Islands. It was a windy, choppy day and
most of the passengers were pretty subdued, many of them huddled in the misery
of seasickness. There was one tall older man, however, who stood gazing out
over the waves, seemingly unaffected by the rough sailing, the breeze catching
his fine, longish white hair. He had a red scarf around his neck. He struck me
as someone very unusual and interesting, someone I’d like to get to know. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">When we arrived on the island, the tall man and his son took the same
pony cart as Sharon and I, and it turned out they were staying at the same bed
and breakfast place we were. That evening at dinner we shared a table in the B
& B. The man introduced himself and his son, Noah. He was
Robert Bly, the poet and author of <i>Iron John.</i></span></span></div>
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<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img alt="StumbleUpon" src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble7.gif" border="0" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01738454933478971984noreply@blogger.com0