In Which an Author Gives Me His Chair

No, this isn't some high-handed metaphor (not yet, at least). Tonight, I went to a reading by Michael Martone, author of a bunch of books, including these:
 

The reading was in Bracken Library at Ball State University, and I got there kind of late, so the room was already standing-room-only. Actually, that's unusual by itself. Seating generally isn't a problem at events like this. Since all of the seats were filled, I took a spot against the wall, planning to stand and watch the reading from there. I was pretty close to the front and had a good view of the podium--not a bad vantage point at all. 

After I had been standing there for a few minutes, this man--

This is Michael Martone, if you didn't know.

--stood up and told me I could have his seat. Now, I had already sat in on a class Martone visited earlier in the day, so I knew what he looked like. Still, it took a second for me to register what was happening: The most important guy in the room--literally the reason everyone was there--was offering me his chair. It's not like he was getting up to read right at that moment, either. He sat down on the floor for around 10 minutes before it was time for him to read. 

I half expected him to take off his bow tie (yes, he was wearing a genuine bow tie, which are cool, while we're on the subject) and start washing everyone's feet with it. You have to admit, the guy looks at least a little bit like middle-aged Jesus. 

Since I'm a visual learner, I often don't get a lot out of readings, but Martone's personality and repartee made him memorable, even if I don't remember all of his stories (I use that term loosely) all that well. It didn't hurt that he's an Indiana writer and the crowd was primarily made up of Hoosiers, either. 

And I got a story out of it myself, too. 

Taking Notes and Novel Reading

"I think someone said something about that somewhere in this book. No, I don't remember who, or when, or what page it's on. But I'm sure it's in there. Trust me, Prof."

Ever since I started college, and now, as I'm halfway through grad school, I have hated conversations like the one above. I have a somewhat obsessive attachment to my memory (from my high school Bible Quizzing days, but that's another story), and besides that, those kinds of conversations just don't make me sound like the budding brilliant intellectual I need my professors to know I am. That's not all grad school is about, of course, but it is part of it.

If you can't back up a statement with evidence, you might as well not even make it.

In order to save face and sound smart, I've developed a system for taking notes while I'm reading a novel that works pretty well for me.

A screenshot of my notes
from Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist.

While I'm reading a book, I have my computer open in front of me, and whenever I come across something I want to note (introduction of characters, important place names, themes, recurring images, etc.), I write a short entry like the ones you see in a screenshot. At the beginning of each line, I write the page number and a brief note about whatever I want to remember. I separate different notes from the same page with semicolons, because I like semicolons.

I don't write as many notes as I did when I started using this system, and I've gotten better at making them as short as possible the more I've done it. I started learning what kinds of triggers I needed to jog my memory, and then writing down only those keywords in my notes. The longer the notes you write, and the more of them you take down, the longer it takes to get through a book, and the higher your chances of not finishing the book on time and of going insane.

I use the Mac Pages program (instead of MS Word) because of its search function (Pages > Edit > Find > Show Search) that allows me to type in a word and see a list of every entry in the document where that word shows up (shown in the screenshot above). Clicking on an individual result takes you to that exact spot in the document. It's quite useful for finding/remembering patterns and motifs. I haven't found an equivalent function in Word. If I'm missing it, someone let me know, please.

Ordinary Horror in Don't Come Back from the Moon

I have a theory about horror: bizarre things done in a bizarre way aren’t horrific because they are too strange to be relatable, and ordinary things done in an ordinary way aren’t horrific because they’re, well, ordinary. Real horror comes when you combine the extremes. Bizarre things done as if they’re ordinary. Ordinary things done in bizarre ways.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course (there are to any rule), but I think it holds up pretty well. I recently encountered an excellent illustration of my theory in a source where I was not expecting to find it: Dean Bakopoulos’s novel-in-stories Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon.

The premise sounds almost whimsical. In a depressed suburb of Detroit, Maple Rock, fathers tell their families they are going to the moon, and then disappear soon afterward. For these men, though, their trip to the moon is not some grand adventure. In fact, the mystery of their disappearance remains unsolved throughout much of the book; Bakopoulos’s slow, gradual, almost methodical exploration of the lives of the families the absent fathers left behind is as horrific as it is commonplace.

Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon focuses on Michael, Nick, and Tom, three young men forced into becoming men of the house long before they are mature enough to accept that responsibility. Indeed, as Bakopoulos narrates their misadventures, it becomes hard to envision them ever truly growing up.

For a while, I thought Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon was going to be “just another” story about boys becoming men despite the failures of their parents and communities. But there’s much more to it than that.

(If you’ve stumbled upon this post without reading the book first, I’m posting a SPOILER WARNING here.)

As Bakopoulos’s novel progressed, I realized that it was going to end where it began, with a generation of fathers (the sons of the fathers who vanished in the first story) also disappearing. And all of the pedestrian, unremarkable events in between (teenagers drinking, a priest losing his vocation, falling in love, working at a suburban mall) are the developments that will lead those boys to consider abandoning their own wives and children as they grow older.

In Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon’s eponymous beginning story, the fathers’ bizarre disappearance seems mysterious and unexplainable. By the time you reach the final story, “Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (Reprise),” the phenomenon of absent fathers feels not merely ordinary, but inescapable. That graceful movement from bizarre otherness to ordinary recognition makes this one of the more disquieting books I have read. 

Vignette Novels: Mrs. Bridge and Sold

This week for #amlinking, we read Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell's 1959 novel about India Bridge, a character he doesn't like or care about all that much, and the developments in her family over a period of several years. Instead of using the traditional chapter/scene format, Connell writes this novel as a series of vignettes (most are 1-2 pages, while the longest is around 5 pages long).

While I didn't care for the condescending stance Connell takes toward Mrs. Bridge--instead of feeling compassion for a woman whose world is crumbling around her, I felt prompted to point and laugh at her passive inability to take control of her life--the structure was fairly interesting. The main advantage an author can gain from using vignettes (or very short scenes) instead of longer scenes is that it forces the author to have a specific purpose for each section (usually just one purpose, though sometimes more), and to figure out how to express that purpose with as little extraneous detail as possible. Obviously, this can save an author from getting lost in a scene that meanders for a long time but doesn't really go anywhere.

A recent novel that uses a similar format is Sold, by Patricia McCormick, which tells the story of a young Nepalese girl, Lakshmi, who is sold into sexual slavery. Sold is told entirely from Lakshmi's first-person narrator point of view, whereas Mrs. Bridge employs an omniscient third-person narrator. McCormick uses this point of view to increase the pathos of the story--as readers, we can figure what is happening to Lakshmi long before she does--as well as to elliptically "look away" from some of the most painful moments in the story. (Since Sold was marketed as a young-adult novel, this strategy proves invaluable to keeping the story from becoming too graphic for its targeted audience.) Additionally, it gives a human, personal voice to what could otherwise become another "tragedy of poverty" story.

Another advantage of the brief scene format is that it allows the author to cover a long time frame in a minimum of pages. Mrs. Bridge covers the entire span of a life in fewer than 250 pages. This format can also give an author greater license to jump around and skip the boring/non essential parts and only focus on the highlights of the story with a minimum of scene-setting and exposition.

One drawback of vignette novels is that, because the story starts and stops so often, it can be difficult to keep readers motivated to continue reading; having to continually jump into one scene after another can be exhausting. This is similar to the problem "novels-in-short-stories" face, except that a single vignette often does not have a complete, self-contained story arc that a short story does.

The Fireworks Factory Plot

Itchy and Scratchy, the subjects of an embedded cartoon series on The Simpsons, are basically Tom & Jerry’s ultraviolent cousins. In the episode “The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show,” Itchy and Scratchy’s ratings have been dwindling, so to resuscitate the show, they add a new character, Poochie, who is kind of like Goofy if Goofy had a surfboard, wore shades, and smoked weed.

In Poochie’s introductory episode, which you can watch here (sketchy YouTube version), Itchy and Scratchy are driving to a fireworks factory, where all kinds of explosive mayhem will surely ensue. Before they reach the factory, however, they meet their new friend Poochy, who introduces himself with a catchy rap song. At this point, the show cuts away from the cartoon to show Millhouse (and this part was cut out of the clip above), who voices the audience’s collective frustration, shouting, “When are they going to get to the fireworks factory?”

That is, the audience (of characters on The Simpsons) has come to expect a certain level of violence from Itchy and Scratchy, and the sign for the fireworks factory has whetted their appetites. Instead of delivering the payoff the audience expects, though, the cartoon is waylaid (or derailed) by the interpolation of Poochie.

This episode led to the concept of what I (and others) have called the “Fireworks Factory" plot, wherein the story is set up for an audience to expect a certain kind of payoff or resolution, but which is either absent or significantly delayed because the story goes in a different direction.

Is a writer’s job always to give readers exactly what they’re expecting? No. There can be good and valuable reasons for playing with an audience’s expectations. That isn’t quite what I’m talking about here, however. In a Fireworks Factory plot, all the story elements have been pointing toward a necessary and significant catharsis, which is then not delivered. Instead, the story goes off in an unforeseen direction that pushes aside the very scene readers have been eagerly waiting for.

Here are a few examples of Fireworks Factory plots:

Pretties, by Scott Westerfeld

Around 2/3 of the way through this YA science-fiction novel, the protagonist, Tally Youngblood, is on a journey to reunite with her friends, who have been absent for the entire novel. On the way, she is waylaid and ends up hanging out with a bunch of characters who are basically Ewoks. She stays with them for a rather long time.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

There are probably several in this 1200+ page novel, but I’ll highlight two. Early in the book, there is a lengthy description of the Battle of Waterloo. It goes on for close to a hundred pages, the last two pages of which are relevant to the plot of Les Mis­. Later, during the climax of the story, when Jean Valjean is carrying the wounded Marius through the sewer, Hugo breaks off to give you an unbelievably detailed history of the Paris sewer system. Seriously, it goes on longer than the Waterloo part does.

The Tree of Life

This film, directed by Terrence Malick, seems to be a simple drama about a family dealing with tragedy. Around half an hour into the movie, Malick breaks away from the family story to depict the creation and history of the universe. I think it’s a brilliant move (it mirrors God’s responses to Job in the Biblical story of Job in order to show the turmoil the mother character experiences), but I have heard that a lot of people left the theater at this point, screaming, “When are they getting back to the family?” They do get back to the family, although it does take a while.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

In this RPG video game for the Nintendo DS, the story kicks off with the heroes accidentally damaging a flying contraption and then setting off on a quest for a part they need to repair it. At the end of the game, they still have not fixed the darned flying machine. I’m not making this up. You go through half the game trying to find the part to fix it, and then once you finally find it, you never get to fix the thing.

The time-travel season of Lost

Self-explanatory.

Again, having a Fireworks Factory sequence in a story isn’t automatically a bad thing. But it will disrupt the rhythm of the plots--might be want you're going for--and can potentially turn off readers--almost certainly not what you're going for--so if you’re going to do it, the payoff that results from the side-trip really needs to be worth it.

Loving the Sunset

Bryan resembled an old-fashioned telephone switching board. Tubes and wires protruded all over his body, connecting him to the machines that had long been more responsible for keeping his body alive than anything inside him.

Caroline, his wife, sat beside him with her hands in her lap. During his first months in the hospital, she touched him as often and as much as she could. She even persuaded the nurse to let her give him his sponge baths. Rubbing his antiseptic sagging skin was the nearest she could come to intimacy with him without endangering what remained of his life. He told her it felt good for a while, but his frustration at not being able to respond to her and the steady deadening of his senses twisted even that pleasure out of his control.

Most recently, the parts of his brain that allowed him to formulate speech started behaving erratically. In the middle of telling Caroline or one of the nurses a joke, he would either forget his thoughts and be unable to finish it, or he would spasm and spout nonsense. When he recovered, he said he preferred the spasms, because those sometimes still elicited a laugh. That he had made his living as a stand-up comedian and often brought his wife along to the more romantic locations was a cruelty everyone knew but never mentioned.

He still had some good moments, bursts of something short of convalescence but better than simple suffering. Those were the times he followed one of Caroline’s conversational monologues, or smiled voluntarily, or loved the sunset. He had requested a room with a west-facing window. He was too lethargic now for anyone other than himself to notice a difference, but he felt better. Before he died, though, he believed he would still make someone happy.

<><><>

On the day Bryan died, Caroline came into his room wearing a yellow dress. It was a couple of shades darker than her hair, and the two combined equaled the color of the sun in his eyes. He preferred her natural color, but he did not tell her because he knew how much she liked being a blonde. Her green eyes, magnified and sparkling from tears that appeared after she dried her face in the hall, shone as brightly as they did every day. She kissed him quickly and sat down, her head in line with his rib cage. She was too far away to hear him.

Instead of looking at his face, which puckered in a tiny crater wherever she happened to kiss it that day, Caroline had lately taken to staring at his hands. Because he had never used them much when he was healthy, their deterioration was less noticeable. She had difficulty focusing her eyes when she looked at him.

She was alert enough, however, to see his index finger move. He raised it less than an inch, and it was only because they had been married for fifteen years that she knew it meant he wanted her to raise her head.

"Closer," he mouthed.

She leaned in, her arms on the side of the bed, but she was still too far away. Whatever he added
in volume he would lose in endurance, and he knew it would take everything he had to say what he needed to tell her.

"Closer," he repeated.

Caroline perched on the edge of the bed and leaned over his chest. She could hear him wheeze out every breath, and to get away from the sound she moved closer to him, so that her chin almost touched his.

She smiled, which surprised both of them. "Close enough?" she asked.

Bryan held his blink for a second longer than normal, and then he spoke. All he could manage was a whisper that came from the front of his throat and did not even sound like his voice, but it was enough.

"I was doing some shows at a resort in the Caribbean. One night after my set, I couldn’t sleep, so I walked on the beach. I saw a woman in the water, splashing and playing like a little girl. Her bathing suit was black. It looked like her arms and legs were spinning and flying on their own, like they weren’t connected. Her hair was blonde, so bright it looked like the sun rising. I stopped and watched, but I didn’t want to disturb her. She was so beautiful, so pure and innocent in the water."

Caroline knew this story. It was how they first met. He got some of the details wrong–she wore a bikini and her hair was red then–but she was thrilled to hear how much he still remembered.

"The next morning, I saw her in the exercise room. I was too distracted to work out, and I almost followed her into the ladies’ shower room. Right before I went on that night, I found an envelope in my dressing room. A picture of her was inside, and she’d written her room number on the back. That night was the worst set I ever did. I couldn’t remember any of my material."

Caroline could not hold back any longer. Trying to be as gentle as she could, she said, "No, that’s not how it happened, honey. I was laying out by the pool, remember? You could see me there from your room. You called room service and had them bring a drink out to me. You made them write your name and room number on the little umbrella. I’d watched all your sets and I thought you were funny, so I went up. You almost passed out when I showed up at your door in my bikini. Don’t you remember that?"

Bryan blinked. "Of course, Care. But this story is about Jackie. She came first. I went to her room after my set, but she wasn’t there, so I changed and went to the beach. She wasn’t there either. I tried to play in the water like her, but I couldn’t. I felt silly. Just when I was getting out of the water, I saw her coming. She was wearing a beautiful white dress, but she took it off and left it on the sand. She introduced herself in her underwear. We went back out, and she showed me how to play in the water."

"Bryan, why are you telling me about this now? You’ve never said anything about it, about her, before. Why wait until now?"

"Care, I want you to understand. That’s all I want now. She was like a sunrise to me. But my sunset was better."

She dug her chin into his collarbone and pressed his sides with her hands; she could not then have said whether it was from anger or affection. Had he been able to feel pain, to scream, or to cry, he would have. But as Caroline knew from the silence in his chest, he was already beyond agony’s reach.

<><><>

All the legal issues and funeral arrangements had to be taken care of, she knew, but they could wait. She rushed out of the room and past the nurses station without saying anything or even looking at them. She barely breathed as she drove home, and she had not even thought about crying.

It was upstairs in their bedroom, tucked unceremoniously away in one of the bottom dresser drawers; she had forgotten which one and so had to search through three full drawers, throwing aside articles of clothing like a burrowing animal, before she found it.

It was wrinkled and dusty, but in good condition overall, considering how long it had been since she last wore it. Her life had been so consumed with taking care of him for so long. She could not even remember the last time she thought about swimming.

She needed to know if it still fit. Caroline had become conditioned to take care of herself and change her clothes in between Bryan’s medications and emergencies, and she undressed and put on the black bathing suit–one-piece, with a low-cut back–in only a few seconds.

She was already crying softly before she looked at herself in the mirror. She collapsed on the floor when she saw her reflection, sobbing and grateful to Bryan for his final gift to her.

I watched Terrence Malick's "The New World" last night. This was my second viewing. The first time, I thought it was supposed to be some kind of historical epic action story, and while there were some cool moments, I mostly thought it was slow and kind of boring. But after reading the chapter on it in Jeffrey Overstreet's "Through a Screen Darkly," I decided I must have missed something the first time and needed to give it another chance. This time I watched it as a love story. (Keep that contrast in mind. It's important.)

The movie basically tells the story of the English colonists' first arrival in the new world, and especially of Pocahontas's relationship with the men she meets. I don't know how accurate the movie is historically, and I honestly don't care. So now that that's out of the way...

The first man Pocahontas meets is John Smith (played by Colin Farrell). He has been locked up in the ship's brig for insubordination, but instead of executing him once they reach land, the captain spares his life. He is freed to wander through the pure wilderness and experience all the wild joy he finds there. Chief among the delights he discovers is Pocahontas (the amazing, gorgeous Q'orianka Kilcher, in her first acting role).

Their first meetings are natural and electric. Though they can't talk to one another yet, they communicate on much deeper levels, seemingly without having to try.

To recap: Smith is the uncontrollable good-looking bad boy, whose shirt is never more than halfway buttoned and who is more at home in nature than in society. He is what John Eldredge thinks every man should be, and Pocahontas falls in love with him instantly. She thinks they will be together forever.

But Smith is an explorer. Seeking out and discovering new things is what drives him. And though he is extremely happy with Pocahontas and does love her, when he is offered a chance to leave her and search for a new path to the Indies, he takes it. The call of an adventure is too strong on him: He has to go.

He is not the man Pocahontas thought he was. She is devastated. She has been told the man she loves, the man she left her family to be with, has died at sea. She wanders through the village like a dazed ghost.

Enter John Rolfe (Christian Bale). He too knows the pain of broken relationships: His wife and child have died. He is a quiet, contemplative, kind man. He does not stand out, doesn't do anything wild and dangerous, and his shirt is always buttoned to the top. He is called a tree: steady, dependable, and providing shelter and shade.

He sees something beautiful in Pocahontas, something worth resurrecting and saving, but she is not interested. She does not want to be hurt again, and anyway, Rolfe's demeanor does not enthrall her the way Smith did. But he persists, gently following her and loving her, even though the love is not intially requited.

Eventually they marry, but Rolfe knows there are parts of her heart his wife will never share with him; they are still with Smith, whom Pocahontas has learned is still alive.

John Smith is nothing like me. I'm not bold or exciting or wild, I don't make first impressions, and I keep myself buttoned up. I have much more in common with John Rolfe, Pocahontas's quietly curious, tentative second lover, and the one who waits months and years for her to decide if she really loves him.

Pocahontas and John Smith meet again near the end of the movie. The temptation (and opportunity) is there for her to go off with the daring explorer, her first love, and leave the shelter and nurture of the tree.

But she doesn't.

She returns to Rolfe and tells him, "You are the man I thought you were, and more."

In Malick's movie, the staid tree gets the beautiful princess. And I get to believe.