Ramifications

"Ramifications of third level gematrian permutations of the Letter B in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales"

In T.K. Mouser’s methodology, the letter B is represented by 11, typed the PhD student. While this is an improvement over the simplistic Rationalist school’s approach of equating B with 2, it remains a second level permutation, which does not allow the same complexity of third level permutation. In the third level gematria advanced by the New School, however, all attempts at consistency are abandoned and the value assigned to Letter B is determined by random selection of an integer 0-9. The same methodology, of course, is applied to the other Letters, except in Scott’s system, in which Z and X are always 0, but CH is represented as a third level Letter.

After a moment, the student added, “[Note to self: What about TH?]”

Reading the computer screen over the student’s shoulder, the student’s room mate said, “I don’t get it. What does this have to do with Chaucer?”

“The only way to interpret texts such as Chaucer is to use gematria,” explained the student. “The old system was to equate A with 1, B with 2, C with 3, and so on. Then you add up all the numbers in a given word and compare it to other words with the same numeric value elsewhere in the text to find the hidden meanings.”

“The hidden meanings?” asked the room mate. “What about the actual meanings?”

“Only people who read for pleasure worry about that,” said the student. “This is Literary Criticism, not bourgeoisie consumption of literature as entertainment.”

“Oh,” said the room mate.

Indeed, typed the student, the rotating random assignment of a single digit numeric value to a Letter results in unsettling fluidity of interpretation, constantly transgressing the boundaries of conventional Alpha-Numeric dichotomies, contesting and problemetisizing the stereotypes of which Letter constitutes which number, and profoundly challenging the norms of racism and sexism.

“I don’t think most racists and sexists are going to be profoundly challenged by Literary Criticism,” said the room mate.

and heterosexism, added the student.

The student continued typing while the room mate wandered off to drink a soda. When the room mate returned, the student was typing:

…thus, since in this fourth reading of The Canterbury Tales, the word “reeve” had the same numeric value as “nun” but in the fifth reading, the same value as “weeping” this shows that…

“How can it show anything?” asked the room mate. “You just assign numbers randomly to words, and it’s not even the same numbers every time. I can’t believe you can get a PhD writing this nonsense.”

“I can’t believe you’re belittling my career like that.” The student sounded more sullen than wounded.

“Sorry. All I’m saying is, since the original words are just turned into random meaningless numbers, which are just compared to other random and meaningless numbers, and the whole point of the methodology is to prove that all literature is random and meaningless… well, why even bother reading The Canterbury Tales? You might as well just analyze Stephen King.”

A guilty flinch from the student compelled the room mate to lean closer. “Hey! You are just reading Stephen King.”

“Okay, yeeeeesss,” allowed the student. “But it’s still not easy to write this stuff. I have to churn out another fifty pages.”

“I’ll go get you a soda,” said the room mate.

Graduate School

If you've been kind enough to wonder if I've fallen off the face of the earth, I'm afraid I have, more or less: I'm in graduate school now, working on my PhD. Until the holiday break, I won't have much time to blog. For your amusement, however, I'll post a flash fiction inspired by my studies.

Where Does Your Brain Get Your Ideas?

I think writers are more familiar than anyone with the strange and unpredictable nature of inspiration. Suddenly, out of seemingly nowhere, a brilliant idea strikes. You might be awake or dreaming. You have to write it down NOW or you risk losing it.

I've always known the best stories arose out of primordial mental chaos. Now, science has proved it.

Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems.

...and write stories.

Book Sales for 2009

How are books selling in Great Depression II? Just great! As long as you take into account that "flat is the new up"!

Total U.S. book publishers’ net revenues reached $40.32 billion in 2008, up 1.0% over 2007, while 2008 unit sales reached nearly 3.1 billion, down 1.5% over 2007, according to Book Industry TRENDS 2009, the Book Industry Study Group’s comprehensive annual research study.

Writing Drunk or Sober

Some thoughts on writers and internet addiction:

I am coming to suspect that the internet will be to my generation of journalists, and to any younger ones, what alcohol was to our predecessors': a destroyer first of thought and then of productivity, destructive both of the capacity to reflect, and to react, blurring everything into a haze of talk and endlessly repeated variations on the same experience. Just like alcohol, and even cigarettes once were, it seems an inevitable part of the job, one of the things that distinguishes it from all others. Stories are chased and found on the net just as they once were in bars.

This won't kill journalism, or thought, of course. There were always many journalists who functioned drunk, and some who could not function any other way.

...But the internet has no edges, any more than it has depth. The sudden movement of someone else's thought across a screen is something you can follow far beyond the room in which your thoughts could be confined. There's no tether to jerk you back and by the time your thoughts return, the room has changed: whatever lay in front of the next sentence has disappeared. And so I sit now in a room with a window and no telephone, waiting for the next sentence, patient and pious as a dried-out drunk.

Consider this my explanation for why my blogging has been light of late.

Novels vs Poems, Integrity of Language

I've found a great way to come up with ideas for new blog posts is to just steal them from The Literary Lab and I've done that again. This post of theirs on revising has been percolating through my mind for some time now:

I consulted a poet friend that I have mentioned once or twice here before. His name is Craig Cotter, and over dinner I asked him why he made certain word choices or phrase constructions in several of his poems....

What I realized was that Craig had initially limited himself to what edits he was allowed to make. The source of his inspiration, the motivation that got him to write this poem in the first place, he felt, was preserved in that first draft, not in the idea of that first draft. That meant that he couldn't revise everything. He couldn't start from scratch with the same idea, because that would be a different poem--one that he could write at a different time.

My gut reaction reading this was to think, "But prose is different from poetry. A novel is different from a poem." A novel -- at least the kind of novel I write -- is all about the idea. The words are merely buckets which I use to scoop it up. I could imagine changing the buckets without changing the idea carried therein.

I also vaguely felt like I had visited this argument before.

Sure enough, I consulted Dancing at the Edge of the World a collection of essays by Ursula Le Guin and found the argument in the essay "Reciprocity of Prose and Poetry." She quotes Huntington Brown, who supported my gut's reaction:

If it be asked wherein a poet's attitude toward his matter diffres from that of a prose writer, my answer would be that in prose the characteristic assumption of both writer and reader is that the subject has an identity and an interest apart from the words, whereas in poetry it is assumed that word and idea are inseparable.

Fair enough, as far as I'm concerned, but Le Guin objects:

...there is in his definition an implication that cannot be avoided and should be made clear: It is the language that counts in poetry and the ideas that count in prose. Corollary: Poetry is untouchable, but prose may be freely paraphrased.

Er, yes. Precisely. What's the problem?

The integrity of a piece of language, poetry or prose, is a function of its quality; and an essential element of its quality is the inseperability of idea and language. When a thing is said right it is said right, whether in prose or poetry, formal discourse or cursing the cat. If it is said wrong, if it lacks quality, if it is stupid poetry or careless prose, you may paraphrase it all you like; chances are you will improve it.

Oh. Quality. Yes, well, that does it explain it, doesn't it. I daresay, you could take all of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, and paraphrase it, and as long as you kept the magnificent idea of it, you'd have lost little. But I don't think you could do the same to A Wizard of Earthsea. This is not to insult either author, but simply reflects the fact that Asimov wrote his stories as though they were encyclopedia entries (and as a matter of fact, an encyclopedia entry on the fall of the Roman Empire inspired the entire Foundation series) whereas Le Guin wrote all her prose tales as though they were secretly poems.

Perhaps this is my problem, and why I'm struggling with uneven prose right now. At times, I also wish to gild my novel in secret poems. At other times, I merely want the easiest bucket to slosh it out onto the page. But sloshy words frustrate me, leading me to revise again and again. Each time I revise, I find that I have not merely paraphrased the poor wording, but changed the ideas, proving that words and ideas, after all, are inseparable. And so I've come around to the complete opposite conclusion of my gut reaction, but the same result. I must revise, like it or not, until the prose has more poesy.

Uneven Writing Quality

Even though I am not going to look at it again until I have heard back from my beta readers, I already know one problem with my wip is uneven prose. The first chapters and the last chapter are colored, curled and styled to a chic finish, whereas middle chapters look like a hair-cut by an ax. Even beta readers tend to gloss more over the middle than the beginning, as they suffer from crit fatigue. Does anyone else have this problem? Any solutions or tips?

Between Old and New

I haven't started writing yet on my Secret Novel (research continues) and I've forbidden myself from even looking at Dindi until I finish writing my critiques for my Beta partners and receive their crits on Dindi in turn. This leaves me with nothing to write or revise and I'm starting to get antsy. I've even -- deities help me -- taken to doing house work! (Desperate times indeed.)

Why Character Driven Fiction Can Be Subtle

I'm still at the research stage of my Secret Novel. I'm entering new territory with this novel. Dare I say it is literary?

Perhaps -- I've concluded after spying on the discussion over at The Literary Lab -- not.

Although the period of my piece is fairly contemporary, I see it as historical fiction. Some historical fiction is undoubtedly literary, but some must be mainstream. A definition to distinguish the two has been put forth: "what distinguishes literary fiction is what is left unsaid. Narrators may be self-absorbed or unreliable, things are pointed to without being explained." It is what happens "between the lines."

Thinking about a historical novel like The Source by James Michener, I wondered if what happens is between the lines. I decided, not really. The themes are deep and mind-blowing, almost incomprehensible, despite being stated as explicitly as possible.

I think most literary stories are character-focused and the game is all about inferring things about the characters from their actions, and the descriptions. Frankly, I think the reason it is easier to let these kind of stories be read between the lines is because most humans, perhaps especially most readers, have minds designed to understand other human minds. We cannot intuitively understand the passage of 6,000 years -- on the contrary, to be comprehensible, even this must be shown to us through characters. It must be brought to a human level.

When those other factors are not present, the focus on characters can be subtle in the extreme -- because we have (or at least some of us do) exceedingly refined cognitive powers of inference when it comes to unlocking human motives, emotions and relationships.

I recently finished The Favorite by Mary Yukari Waters. I don't often read the literary genre, so I wasn't certain what to expect. Indeed, for the first third of the book, I kept waiting for "something" to happen. All that appeared on stage was a bunch of female relatives taking tea together, going on walks, and talking about their family relationships. Okay, I get it, I thought, the relationshipsare the plot, but even so... I persevered and a strange thing happened. (Don't laugh, I'm new at this!) I truly began to feel I could enter the minds of these people, like a telepath. And I realized the illusion of telepathic powers was so convincing in part because nothing else dramatic was happening. It was as if I could reach in to the ordinary minds of ordinary people and experience their greatest fears, sorrows, joys and memories.

I have a recurrent fantasy, which often occurs to me when I am walking or driving, of acquiring the ability to read the minds of passers-by, total strangers. I wish to experience qualia as another does (the holy grail of philosophers), to become another person, then return to being myself with full comprehension of both.

There are, of course, many telepathic characters in science fiction, and even in wider fiction, but how convincing this telepathy is depends on the skill of the writer. If the writer is not also a telepath/empath, the portrayal can be weak indeed. According to the cognitive science "theory of theory of mind" (sic) we are all mind readers, to a greater or lesser extent. Those of us closer to the autistic side of the spectrum may prefer genres which tend to have flatter, easier-to-read characters, whereas those with highly honed hyper-acute mind reading skills may find flat characters painfully boring. Such readers need meatier fare, more subtly flavored, and salivate at the challenge of discerning every nuance of realistic relationships between imaginary minds.

I would love to be able to cook up such characters -- in theory. But am I really capable of focusing so finely on characters? I'm not sure. I tend to think more abstractly than empathically, and so I am frequently distracted by other sorts of patterns besides mind reading. I gravitate toward histories more than memories, philosophies more than personalities and clever ideas more than realistic characters.

I do want to mind read my characters as deeply and realistically as possible, but, I realize, not for their own sakes as much as for what they can tell me about their societies, cultures and the great events in which they've participated. In always grasping at the larger picture, I worry I may miss many of the subtle details.

Choosing a Character who Sees Deeply

I really want to reveal the nature of my secret novel, before I make it so mysterious that it becomes a let down when I finally do reveal it.

That said, I'm not ready to talk details yet. As Scott Bailey mentioned in the comments on his blog post about outlining, it's not so much because I'm trying to keep it secret as that I don't feel comfortable jinxing it before I have a draft. So, for now, it's still the secret novel.

That said, I'll still discuss a problem in general terms, if I may. That's choosing a character who can see deeply.

I have several characters already chosen for me, as it were, by the nature of the novel. I know who my four main pov characters must be, at least in broad strokes. I still have to make sure, however, that the personality of these characters is not only sympathetic enough to justify being a protagonist, but profound enough to have insights into their own situations.

This is tricky.

I don't want the characters to be a mere mouthpiece for me the author. On the other hand, there are certain philosophical observations I would like my characters to be in a position to explore. I have to make certain I don't make them all dingbats. At the same time, their pov is going to be necessarily limited by where they are and what they are allowed to see, so I mustn't give in to the temptation to make them all knowing, either.

Unless I bypass my characters and write in omniscient.

I didn't realize how tempting that would be.

Or... here is a strange idea. I could introduce an omniscient narrator who is actually revealed to be a character at the end of the book. This voice over could philosophize along the way.

Hm. Probably I should just avoid the temptation to philosophize altogether.

Is it important to you to have a character who sees deeply, who is intelligent and observant, or do you prefer to work with "naive" characters, who, while themselves innocent of what is really going on around them, allow the reader to see past them, into the real situatoin?