Terry Heath

Is Your Blog Making You an Information Middleman?

2010-03-10T06:04:00.000-08:00

Joe wants information. Joe googles his topic, reads a few blog posts from the search results, then goes his merry way. Information is a commodity and these blogs have just served Joe as middlemen.

Is your blog making you an information middleman?

This idea was sparked by a post on Fred H. Schlegel's Frog Blog, Avoid Middleman Status. Fred observed how middlemen are being pushed out of the supply chain in many industries.

"This is not a new state of being. Walmart began its attack on independent distributors (middlemen with warehouses) ages ago wiping most of them out. They are so efficiently tied into their supply chain now that orders sometimes bypass headquarters and go straight to factories. (Headquarters as middlemen, who’d of thunk it?)"

I commented:

"My mind wanders toward blogging and how bloggers might also make themselves into middlemen. We can (and often do) end up being the middlemen between information and web users."

The facts conveyed in many blog posts are often commodities. Here's how Merriam-Webster defines them:

"a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price"

Blog posts about blog posts, as well as other metablogging topics, abound. So do blog posts about SEO, blog traffic and a host of other topics which are supposed to be of interest to bloggers. These posts are commodities and diminish the value of their bloggers' blogs.

In other words, bloggers whose blogs offer commodity information diminish their brands, turning themselves into information middlemen.

And as Fred so astutely pointed out, middlemen are an endangered species.

Blogging's False Economics

2010-02-28T07:50:00.000-08:00

I grew up in a small town. Like many small towns, the downtown district of my hometown has spent much of the last 20 years searching for an identity. The buildings are old, parking is limited, and commerce has moved to strip malls and mega retailers in newly developed areas. It has been interesting to watch the various ways downtown merchants have attempted to monetize the district.

In some ways, blogs run in a parallel universe to shops in the downtown district of my hometown. They develop false economies in order to survive, they come and go quickly but a few of the strong survive, and there are often several empty storefronts waiting to be filled.

There are valuable lessons for bloggers in the comparison.

The False Economy

One of the first big restoration movements in my hometown was what I'll call the "antique mall syndrome". In case you're not familiar with the concept, basically someone rents a storefront and sublets spaces to vendors who peddle their own "antiques" (which are often just garage-sale fodder).

My hometown's antique-mall phase was touted as the answer both to its many empty shops and its identity crisis. These antique malls made for interesting browsing, and created a certain amount of traffic. The problem is, they created what I call a "false economy" (yes, it's my own term).

The shop owner now seems to have a successful retail business. It is full of merchandise, it is attracting attention, and the traffic count is growing. It is now a hub of activity, but there is one small problem. The owner is making money, but not because anyone is buying merchandise.

The vendors are paying space rent, the vendors are paying for advertising, the vendors are paying commissions and fees for whatever is actually sold. Although they dream of being successful retailers, most of the vendors are nickel and dime operators and they're happy just to break even. Some months they pay out of their own pockets to keep their spaces, but they view that as an inevitable part of owning a new business.

But the store as a whole only needs to make enough sales to keep its vendors interested. When one vendor leaves there is usually another to take the place. The store does not need to meet a real need of the customer; it only has to keep its vendors hooked. It gives a false impression of success, based on a false economic picture.

The Revolving Door

One of the notable characteristics of my hometown's downtown district is the rapid turnover of its tenants. Because the storefronts are sometimes inexpensive to rent, many shops open with poor planning and insufficient capital. Often, vendors from the antique malls attempt to build their own false economies but lack the connections to attract and maintain vendors.

Because they lack the resources or fortitude to purchase or create their own products, these retailers often stock their shops with consignment merchandise.

These shops fail because of:

A failure to plan, or poor planning
A lack of capital to sustain them through infancy
Failure to meet the needs of the customer (the public or the vendors)

A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on these shops, financial, physical, and emotional. While opportunities are available for prospective business owners to gain the training they need to open and sustain a successful business, most of these owners do not seek it.

A few of the strong do survive but remain on the fringe. They might be unusually tenatious or willing to live off limited resources, but they are not what could be called successful. Their businesses are emotionally, physically, and financially draining.

The Empty Shop Syndrome

In the midst of all this rapid turnover of shops in the downtown district, at any given moment many storefronts are empty. These empty shops serve as a deterrent to shoppers; experience has shown when too many shops remain empty in an area, buyers go somewhere else. But these empty shops look like opportunity to those who have dreamed of owning a shop someday.

The cost of entry is low and there are few hurdles to jump before you can have a shop of your own. Potential shop owners see the activity at the larger antique malls and expect they can do just as well. They set up a retail business on the assumption there is retail activity in the area without realizing the area is suffering with the antique shop syndrome.

Interestingly, neophyte shop owners often decide to rent a storefront before they have anything to put in it. They might not even have a complete vision of the type of business they will open. They are pursuing the dream of opening a business first, and figuring out the details later.

The same problem which enables the downtown district's decline also perpetuates itself. It is a difficult cycle to break because it is a difficult problem to recognize, but eventually the entire district will fail.

Blogging Suffers These Same Ailments

Some blogs appear to be financially successful but are actually parasites living off the blood, sweat, and tears of others. They sell advertising spaces in their sidebars, and they sell editorial space in their posts. The amount they charge is small enough that none of the advertisers are hurt deeply, but both transactions result in few or no sales. The advertisers hang on with the belief they are building their brands and success is just a matter of time.

As these blogs increase their traffic they can charge more for the space, but there is no impetus to build quality, targeted traffic which will benefit the advertisers. There is no real reason to produce quality posts which will truly benefit the reader. These blogs serve nobody but the blogger.

But like the ailing downtown district suffering with the antique mall syndrome, these blogs create a false economy. There appears to be happy readers and happy advertisers, but in fact there may only be a happy blogger.

In the second stage of this false economy, others try to emulate the apparent success of these busy little blogs. Because the cost of entry is very low new blogs spring up right and left, but these are blogs without a plan, without a real purpose, and without a real passion for their topic. The mortality rate is high for these infant blogs, although a tremendous amount of resources are spent in the hopes of keeping them alive.

A few of the strong do manage to survive, but it is not a marriage based on love. One day the blogger will wake up and wonder why they have spent so much time in this relationship; they will roll over in bed, tell themselves they just don't want to do it anymore, and that will be the end of their blogs. They won't have the energy or passion to keep things going, and the blog will fold. It will fold, but not before inspiring other bloggers to follow the same road.

It sounds ridiculous to say anyone will rent a storefront without having a clear idea of the business they will operate there, but it does happen when the threshold to entry is low. In a similar fashion, many bloggers start a blog without a clear idea of what sort of blog they will operate; it only seems more acceptable because fewer resources are at stake.

Many bloggers throw a few ideas against the wall to see what sticks. This method works for some, but many become too discouraged to continue. Either way, a little forethought and planning could not only save wasted resources (money, time, spiritual and emotional) but it could also perpetuate the birth of more meaningful blogs and more bloggers with a passion for their topic.

The blogosphere does suffer many of the same ailments which plague a dying downtown district. It suffers from the antique mall syndrome, the revolving door, and the empty shop syndrome. Bloggers start their blogs with expectations, but in the long run the vast majority of these expectations remain unmet.

Blogging as a community and an industry suffers as well, as readers turn to more effective, well-planned venues for information. All the empty shops and rapid turnover creates the impression blogs are neither a viable business option, nor a valuable asset for the online world, so potential readers and businesses go elsewhere.

Image by: takomabibelot

"Hark, the Herald Pygmies Sing"

2009-12-24T06:04:00.000-08:00

It has been said Christmas in the Pacific Northwest is a gift wrapped in green. Although we’re blessed here with an abundance of fir trees and evergreens, many of us still dream about a Christmas of white. More often than not, however, we get a Christmas of just plain wet. So it was one Christmas Day a few years back.

Although wet, our Christmases here are as merry as the white variety and this particular wet Christmas for me had been a day spent with family and friends. As far as I knew all the gifts had already been given and unwrapped, and all the festivities had come to a close. But I hadn’t anticipated the festivities waiting for me back home.

The automatic light flipped on as we pulled into the driveway, adding to the glow from a thousand colored lights lining the house. Although home looked inviting in the dark and stormy night, the short trip from car to backdoor seemed a daunting task. I tucked my head under my coat and made a run for it.

A small herd of pygmy goats, about a dozen of my own and another dozen or two of my housemate’s, live in a simple wood barn tucked behind the house. They often greet anyone who approaches with a bleating chorus, half to greet and half to scold for being away. It was dark, it was wet, and the goats had missed their Christmas dinner. So their scolds that evening fell especially harsh. I had intended to ignore their complaints for the moment. Once inside I could don more fitting apparel and tend to the goats’ holiday feast. But during that particular moment in the rain, I just wanted to get indoors.

“Did you hear that?”

Of course I could hear it, anyone who didn’t hear the cater-wailing goat chorus should have been pronounced deaf.

“When is Bree due?”

“Next month.”

I felt a little irritated by what seemed an irrelevant question. Bree was one of my pregnant does and I knew she had a good three weeks to go before kidding. At the moment I was too wet and too cold to entertain any other possibilities. But suddenly from underneath the steady drone of the goat chorus I could hear smaller voices, higher pitched and more staccato. Everything I had been carrying landed on the back porch and I made a dash for the barn.

Two tiny figures dimly reflected the lights from the porch and the colored decorations as they maneuvered through the deep mud just outside the barn door. A row of curious white noses watched from inside the barn. Once I managed the presence of mind to plug in the barn light, Bree could be seen standing in the rain, shaking and uncertain. Two newborns circled her, very dirty and very wet.

I scooped up the babies and put them inside my coat, calling for towels. As if she hadn’t been agitated enough before, now their mother ran in hysterical circles. Unable to see her babies, she became blind to the rain and the mud. I held my coat tight around the two newborn kids and fought their mother until I had securely latched us all inside the barn.

I held the babies close to my body, sitting on the barn floor wet and muddy, rocking them and hoping to make up for their neglected birth. They struggled against being held at first, calling back and forth with their mother, but eventually became content in their warm new nest. Their mother remained worried and kept a close eye on me, but eventually accepted the new arrangement. I stayed with them through the rest of the evening to make sure the little boy and little girl were dry and nursing.

In ancient times a certain famous baby’s birth was announced by a chorus of angels. He was born in a stable, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lay in a manger. He was attended by three wise men. In my Christmas reenactment many years later, two baby goats were announced by a chorus of pygmy goats, wrapped in a swaddling coat and visited by a not-so-wise man who now pays closer attention to breeding dates.

For some, Christmas may be a gift wrapped up in white and for others Christmas is a gift wrapped up in green. That year, for me, Christmas was a gift wrapped up in mud.

What Are You Bringing to the Table?

2009-12-21T06:12:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the course of every family gathering I experienced as a child, my dad would tell a story.

My dad's stories were all true, or at least started out being true, and were usually about something you wouldn't necessarily expect to be funny. Nevertheless, he would always bring his audience to tears of laughter.

It was all in the way he told his stories.

My dad was big on visual aids, so he had to stand and use a lot of exaggerated hand gestures to illustrate his tale. My favorite part was how he would act out the reactions of his various characters. Dad might have made a great comedian.

Our family gatherings just wouldn't have been the same without my dad and one of his stories.

Every gathering is like a tapestry. It is woven in a combination of colors which cannot be duplicated anywhere else. If any one person is added or removed from the gathering, the tapestry will be changed.

For many, the holidays are a time for gatherings. They might be with friends, co-workers, or family, but at every gathering each person brings their unique contribution to the table.

But what if instead of being themselves, each person studied a manual and followed some formula for being "A Person At a Party" or how to converse at a party?

The tapestry would be a dull beige.

My last post discussed how information is a commodity and how information-based blogging might put a blogger out of business.

"Bloggers whose blogs offer commodity information diminish their brand, turning themselves into information middlemen."

While there is nothing wrong with blog posts which offer information, information is not all that makes a blog valuable. If an informative post is left at the commodity level, then the blog and the blogger move into the background. Your visitors will come, go, and forget you; only a nucleus of visitors will remain. But if we bring our unique qualities to the table, our posts and our blogs can never be a commodity.

What are you bringing to the table?

Let's All Share Some SPAM For The Holidays

2009-12-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

The holidays are a time to gather at the table sharing fellowship, fun and of course, food. However, in the blogosphere we seldom find opportunity to gather in a similar fashion.

So I thought it might be fitting for the season to invite those of you who pass this way to share one of the most frequently consumed dishes of bloggers worldwide.

Of course I am speaking of that manna of the blogosphere, that ever popular and prolific web-based dish, SPAM.

What's that you say? You don't really care for SPAM, that little gift left on your doorstep by so many of your blog visitors? Possibly you simply haven't yet developed a taste for it.

SPAM is, of course, an acquired taste. Ever wishing to be helpful, I will endeavor to help you develop an appreciation for these tasty little morsels.

Here are four reasons you could like or at least appreciate SPAM:

1. People (and machines!) sometimes leave SPAM in an effort to be friendly or just plain helpful.

SPAM informs me of places I can do such useful things as getting rich and provides me with a long list of with helpful links to get me there. Realizing I might not yet be rich enough to pay cash for necesseties like cars, boats and homes, many thoughtful spammers leave comments about where I can obtain instant credit, possibly without a credit check!

Sometimes SPAM simply extends a hand in friendship:

"Yo,

I’m Anna, I’m 32 old, I work in a medicalised french rest house. it’s great to share with you and I’d would like to talk in english

cheers,

Anna :: maison de retraite"

Some spammers attempt to be both friendly AND helpful:

"very nice, have a good day, buy botox"

From time to time SPAM might at first appear offensive, maybe offering links where one might find sexual gratification. But if we remind ourselves SPAM is just a way to reach out and touch someone, such offerings come back into perspective.

2. SPAM can be good for your ego.

Spammers freqently comment on the wisdom behind my posts and the brilliance of my blog in general. This really helps when I feel down in the dumps. Often these spammers tell me they are going to bookmark or subscribe to my blog and tell all their friends to do the same:

"I like this place very much. This is such a extraordinary web. And it is not like other money directed place, the information here is very important. I am definitely bookmarking it as well as sharin it with my friends."

Evidently they do tell their friends and their friends are just as generous because the amount of SPAM I receive seems to grow exponentially!

3. SPAM offers a way for you to give something back.

Often spammers simply wish to tap my brain (understandably, since they have already expressed their admiration for my mental powers). I receive numerous tidbits of SPAM asking where the best cell phone rates might be obtained, or simply:

"…please where can I buy a unicorn?"

4. SPAM opens doors to communication.

Now I must admit, occasionally I do receive a bit of SPAM which I don't fully understand. Some of it seems to be written in some other language and it saddens me I can't enjoy it fully. Other spammers seem to exist on an entirely different plain than myself, yet I am happy they have decided to share:

"I stand here today humbled by the task before dofus kamas, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our cheap dofus kamas. I thank President dofus power leveling for his service to buy dofus kamas, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition."

I wonder what or who dofus kamas is . . .

So come. Gather 'round the table and, in the spirit of this season, let's share some of those tasty SPAM morsels which have blessed our blogging doorsteps.

You may leave your dish in the comments here; think of it as a holiday pot luck.

What's It All About, [INSERT YOUR NAME HERE]?

2009-12-03T08:09:00.000-08:00

December is an excellent time for retrospective blog posts. It must be, since so many bloggers do "Best Of" and "Looking Back" posts in December. So who am I to swim against the tide?

Actually, looking back through the year's posts can be an informative process for any blogger. And this seems like an excellent place to insert (again!) one of my favorite quotes, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci:

Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.

Well, I found this exercise a great way to actually find harmony and proportion but it's still a great quote.

In a moment of desperately trying to think of a posting topic, I probably would have gotten around to a retrospective post sometime this month anyway, but Joanna Young got me thinking about the whole thing a little early, and a little less desperately, by announcing her group writing project, "Essential Lines From 2009" (and I just realized her title rhymes; how cool is that?).

Before you say to yourself, "P-shaw," and dismiss the entire thing, I want to stress how totally valuable this exercise was for me. And doing it yourself could be similarly valuable for you.

Why? Because looking over a year of your own posts gives you a great sense of perspective. Remember the Emerson quote I just quoted (again!) yesterday?

Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

Looking over a year of my own posts reminded me why I blog and prompted me back to a path I had somewhat strayed from. (And yes, that path allows me to write incredibly awkward sentences like that last one, without going back to judge and fix it.)

Now, you might be totally confused if you remember the blog you're reading right now is totally new. But you must also remember it is pre-populated with posts from where I was previously blogging.

So anyway, in Joanna's exercise we're supposed to select our "essential" post for 2009. You know, the one that defines our blog, us, and the entire universe. It is also supposed to have a few catchy lines in it so Joanna can include them in a summary post of the participants' essential posts.

At first I thought I'd use my personal essay, "Do Not Go Gentle." It says much about what went on in my life over the last year or so, and it says a lot about me as a person. But after thinking a bit, it doesn't really define my blog.

That took me back to a post I view as a turning point in my life as a blogger, "Removing the Stick From Up My Ass." Aside from the fact this post brought in a disturbing amount of search engine traffic from people searching for the keywords "stick up my ass," this post gave birth to a style of blogging I continually try to revisit. It was where I realized the power of blogging in a transparent style.

That post became the first in an inadvertent series of 10 posts modeling that transparent style and really defining who I want to be as a blogger.

Here is the entire series, in case you are feeling exceptionally curious or stalkerly:

But for Joanna's exercise, I had to pick one post. So I have chosen the third in this series, "Beautiful Statues, Clever Horses, and Letting the Crap Fly." I chose it largely for these two quotes, which summarize a theme within the series:

There are so many subtle ways we can censor and censure ourselves. We don't need to be afraid to let the occasional "crap" fly when it needs to.

It also contains this trinket of wisdom:

If you just do what other people want you to do, you might end up as glue or working with puppets.

If you've ever wondered just what the Pygmalion Effect was, go read this post right now! Or if not, why don't you just go read it anyway? If nothing else you'll learn the wisdom behind my glue and puppets quote.

So thank you, Joanna. This is a powerful exercise and just what I needed right now.

Gee, maybe there really is such a thing as serendipity.

Image: Dendroica cerulea

Aren't We All Flying By The Seat of Our Pants?

2009-12-02T08:15:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we struggle to find our place in this world. We search for our identities, seeking to define ourselves or asking others to define us. We are comfortable when things, people and ourselves come with tidy labels.

"What do you do?" has become a deeper question than "How do you do?"

I have often been a participant in this angst of our age, searching for this elusive label, the one I expect to both define and fulfill me, and announcing I've found it seconds before a different possible label occurs to me.

Leonardo da Vinci is attributed with this quote:

Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.

An old proverb tells us hindsight is 20/20. Perhaps we can gain perspective on "who" and "what" we are by stepping back and noticing who and where we've been in our lives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

I've often struggled to find a label for my blogging, seeking to find my "place" on the web. I've tried several identities but often felt like someone fitting a square peg in a round hole. But a little hindsight tells me, perhaps it is enough for my online identity to simply be "someone who happens to blog." After all, that is what I've inadvertently been doing all the time I've been searching for an online identity. The simplest definition of a blog is that it's a log which happens to be on the web. My various posts under the various hats I've tried to wear create the cumulative effect of providing a web log, documenting the process.

Am I comfortable with standing on a soapbox and proclaiming this documentation process as blogging's highest call? I think so.

Instructional blogs abound, bloggers attempting to position themselves as authorities on a variety of subjects, but few are willing to step out from behind that authoritative voice.

In one of my favorite books, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, Michael Gerber points out that most of us really don't know what we're doing. We're all flying by the seat of our pants and hoping nobody else figures that out.

So I'm telling you right now, I'm flying by the seat of my pants. Are you?

That's one reason I'm starting this new blog. Oh I know, I've started others before. I can't promise this one won't be a flash in the pan like all the others but I do think I'm starting this one a little more informed than I have been in the past.

Sorry if you're confused, but this is a new blog; I've simply imported the posts I've written in other places.

I find that blogging comes naturally to me. I've always logged my experiences in one way or another. I used to think I was meant to be a teacher, but really it's always been more about sharing than teaching. I'm not very interested in breaking things down into a pedagogical sequence, but I do like to share things I've learned or things I'm excited about.

I guess that's why I write, why I've started painting, and why I'm interested in so many creative means of expression. And I guess that's why I'm a blogger.

I think that label suits me, at least for today.

Image: Gail S

Self Expression, Cauliflower and Santa Claus

2009-11-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

For me it has always been about the images, the look on her face or something about his eyes when he said a certain thing. I remember things in books by where they are on the page.

My sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Peterson, said I see things like an artist. I've wondered what she meant.

As a child I could sit and draw or paint for hours, just for the joy of it. My biggest goal might be to show my mom when I was finished. Drawing things brought them into being. I think it was a way to bring the things I wanted into my life. Once completed I might sit for hours with the drawing or painting in my lap, not to admire it as much as to bask in its existence.

I stopped drawing and painting somewhere along the way. I think it had something to do with puberty. Then drawing and painting, along with everything else in my life, required a purpose. I had to be making it for something, for some reason other than the joy of it.

So other things came along with more pressing purposes, and drawing and painting were left at the side of the road.

I've picked them up again over the last couple months. I've ventured into acrylics for the first time and faced my frustration with watercolors. As a child I didn't care if my technique was "right" but I can't seem to find that simplicity these days.

Today I started a painting, my first attempt at a "real" painting. Christmas isn't far off, so Santa Claus seemed a likely subject.

My skills aren't where I want them to be, at least not yet. My washes come out with stripes and little cauliflowers pop up in unwanted places. My lines are not steady.

But a thought occurred to me today as I was painting.

As my dad was getting weak, as the cancer was taking over last Spring, I noticed a look in his eyes. It touched me. He looked old and frail in a way I had never known him to be. Today I was wishing I had captured that look; it is something I would like to paint.

Later I today stood back, examining the work I had done on this watercolor Santa that had consumed the better part of my day. And as I looked at it, I realized those were my dad's eyes.

I hadn't planned it. It was just something that came out as I painted.

I'm not an emotional person, but it caught me off guard.

I've always thought of artistic expression as something Birkenstock-wearing, Yoga performing wool hat wearers pretended to do, flailing their arms as they painted, or danced, or acted or whatever else they were pretending to express themselves through. But I realized today how expression doesn't have to be something conscious.

I've attached a closeup of the painting; it's just a part, the rest isn't finished. But behind the cauliflowers, the stripes, and the wayward lines, those are my dads eyes. Maybe if he was Santa Claus, he too could be eternal.

"Do Not Go Gentle"

2009-09-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

One scoop of the beans, then another. I savor the way they glisten, being lifted from the deep foil bag, falling into the filter. One scoop for every two cups, I learned that somewhere and it seems to work. Three. Four. This morning I linger over the process, relish the experience.

I roll the edges into themselves, pinch the paper-covered wires around the sides of the bag and put it back in the refrigerator. Somewhere I heard fresh coffee beans shouldn't be refrigerated. But we all have our little rituals and they are stronger than the things we hear.

At first I thought dad was being too dramatic. Running mom ragged to take care of him, ragged with a worry that can only come after so many years of being together, the worry, the knowing.

I was angry for that at first. Mom is four years older and doesn't need to be waiting on dad hand and foot. He can do it. He could eat, he just chose not to, and he was worrying her to death.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you're okay."

Really, he wasn't. We didn't know it was cancer. You don't expect those things. Those are the things the other people go through.

But I could not be angry. I became the one responsible for keeping everything in perspective.

There were the pills, and there was the schedule for the pills, and the real fact if mom didn't take care of them they wouldn't be taken. That had been the routine longer than the cancer.

Dad's cancer had become mom's new hobby.

I took dad to chemo the first few times. He couldn't drive anymore, or wouldn't. I did because somebody had to. I told mom to rest while he was away.

What amazed me about chemo was the routine it had become for so many people. A whole room with their bags of medicine, pumping into their arms or a valve set permanently beneath the collarbone. Nonchalant, they read their books, and Better Homes and Gardens, and sipped their coffee.

I tried not to stare at the crocheted hats with colors and styles you would never see in their magazines. But they didn't concern themselves with fashion anymore; it was only about the cancer.

Dad was never one to read. He would talk. I would try to read, but he would sit on the edge of his seat, ready to spring up for the next conversation. The routine hadn't gotten to him.

I wonder now if he sat like that because he wanted to spring up and run away. "This isn't happening to you, Mr. Heath. It was all a mistake. You may go."

It must have been frustrating for him, with me being so ready to settle in and read.

But that was early on. He fought it more back then. Later he just looked impatient and tired struggling to get in the car and fasten his seatbelt.

"It's the shits getting old," he said.

I wanted to be impatient too. Do it faster, dad. Then it will get finished and I can go home to forget this until next time.

I wondered if dad would make it to Christmas. It wasn't about living another day as much as getting through the next landmark.

But by Christmas things looked better. We had learned to justify everything better by then. "Prostrate cancer isn't much different than diabetes, it's just something you treat."

Even if dad was 78. Never mind the bone cancer; we hardly ever thought about that.

By the New Year there had been variations, the chemo stopped for awhile and a pump that dispensed antibiotics took its place, then it left and the chemo returned.

Around the end of February I arrived to pick up dad. Mom had been on the phone.

"Teresa's in the hospital," she said.

I didn't say anything. My sister Teresa was a soft topic and I hadn't really exchanged more than a few words with her for years. It wasn't really my choice, but I understood why she stayed away.

"She has had pneumonia and she had a hard time breathing. Cindy took her in, I guess. Nadine just called."

Cindy was her friend, Nadine was my aunt who raised Teresa.

"I didn't even know she was sick, she never calls," she said.

I don't remember what I said. Not much, I'm sure. It was time to start the routine.

Dad was using the walker again, an off and on thing depending on how bad his legs hurt from the bone cancer. He would walk with it out to the truck, shuffling along in the same red flannel shirt and brown casual slacks he always wore. I would put it in back while dad struggled to get in the seat. By the time I would circle around and get in the driver's side, dad would still be trying to get his seatbelt hooked. If it struck me how fragile he had become, I would help him. Sometimes he would get it. Otherwise there was little variety in the ritual.

I don't remember which doctor we saw that day, or which treatment it was, but we had finished and called mom on dad's cell phone when we started back.

"She said she has something to talk to you about," he told me.

"What is it?"

"I don't know."

"Did she say what it's about?"

"No."

And we didn't give it another thought until I got dad home and Tammy's car was in the driveway. My other sister.

We did our old routine in reverse, getting dad back in the house.

Mom was in her chair. Tammy was at the dining room table nearby. They had been crying.

I didn't say anything, what would I have said?

Tammy got up and came over to me. She put her arms around me and said, "Terry, we just lost our sister."

I put my hands on her back to comfort her, but no tears.

I looked at mom. She wasn't crying now. She knew that I wouldn't be, that I never did. She just watched.

I looked at dad. He was looking at the T.V..

My mother was 82 years old but had always looked ten years younger. That day it struck me how fragile she looked. Like a child wanting someone to make things better, but knowing nobody will, nobody can, and you just have to keep going. She looked so small. Until lately I would never have thought of her that way.

She raised me, really her grandson, when the girls and I were put up for adoption by the State. She didn't want to, but it was like her. Nadine took the girls. Mom and dad took me, the youngest and least attached.

So many things had happened by then. My foster sister went to prison five or six years ago for trying to murder her husband when nobody knew she was on meth. Teresa had been sent there too, for awhile. Then mom lost her daughter, our mother, a couple years later to diabetes and cancer, and I think losing a reason to live. Dad had survived congestive heart failure eight years earlier.

Now she just looked at me, and I couldn't make it better.

Dad started talking about what the doctor had said. He had another appointment scheduled, I think. I don't know what else; I couldn't believe he thought it should be about him right then. Not at that moment.

He hadn't acknowledged what I had heard. Did he hear? He must have. I just stood there.

But that had been the routine. It was like scooping beans from the bag; and no point in changing it now.

I didn't say anything at my sister's funeral. It would have felt wrong. I hadn't said anything to her for so long. I hadn't said anything to her the day she died. There were a few who said too much.

We all have our own way to deal with things.

Somebody told my mom she is strong.

"I have to be," she said.

I've sometimes wondered what might have passed through Teresa's mind that morning, before she slipped into a coma, then darkness, then was gone. Did it feel like any other day feels in the morning? She had been up early, difficulty breathing. She knew she had been sick, but did she ever think that day might be her last?

I sat with my father the warm May afternoon when he died. I watched his mouth move to draw in another breath, but his body wouldn't respond.

It just happens, I guess. We go to pull another scoop from the bag but nothing is there. There is no reason to worry about it until that time comes. We just continue our little rituals and when that time finally comes we'll know.

Hardboiled Crime Fiction

2009-08-07T12:03:00.000-07:00

Given enough time, a hypothetical chimpanzee typing at random would, as part of its output, almost surely produce one of today’s mystery/suspense genre novels. Of course, these novels might never form a series with titles that conveniently fall into alphabetical order, and these novels are not likely to be about cats that do various unusual things to solve crimes, but the monkeys might not be too far off. That isn’t to say great fiction doesn’t exist within the mystery and suspense genre, but even so it could easily be argued a great deal of fluff and filler dominates the canon.

Dime novels and penny dreadfuls have long been with us. The late 19th century’s vastly increased mechanization of printing, the growth of efficient rail and canal shipping, and ever-growing rates of literacy gave rise to a demand for stories which had never been paralleled in earlier times. In response to this demand, “quantity over quality” seems to have been a mantra of the publishing industry.

But occasionally a phoenix rises from destruction, producing something which endures. Near the end of the 19th century a magazine called The Strand produced Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and many well-known 20th century authors came from pulp fiction of the 1920s-1950s. Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler and Carroll John Daly emerged from the pages of a magazine called Black Mask. Great detective action came from such competing publications as Dime Detective, Thrilling Detective, or Ten Detective Aces. Isaac Asimov, Frederic Pohl, L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Howard found outlets for their stories in Argosy, Fantastic Stories, Weird Tales and Galaxy, while Zane Grey, Luke Short and Max Brand were found in Lariat Stories, Western Stories, or Star Western.

Joseph T. Shaw, chief editor of Black Mask, described its typical reader as a stalwart, rugged specimen of humanity – hard as nails, swift of hand and foot, clear-eyed, unprovocative but ready to tackle anything that gets in the way. Such readers, Shaw contended, despise injustice, cowardly underhandedness and cheer for the right guy to come out on top. This profile became the model for authors who wrote for the publication. A few of this magazine’s writers developed this model to the level of art, creating a new genre in the world of serious literature, a genre called hardboiled crime fiction. Hardboiled crime fiction has proven one of the more enduring remnants of the pulp fiction era.

Three pillars of the early hardboiled scene are often seen in Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. Where Hammet is said to have originated the consummate hardboiled detective of the hardboiled novel, Chandler is said to have refined him. James M. Cain’s seminal contribution is thought by many to have helped distinguish the genre’s literary merit; his contribution is so earthy, he is sometimes called “the twenty-minute egg of the hardboiled school.”

Throughout the Great Depression and two World Wars, pulp fiction promised an escape from the mundane. For one thin dime, readers could enter the world of gangsters and good guys, cowboys and cattlemen, spaceships and star travelers. Words from the pens of some of the era’s best writers were available at every dry goods store and newsstand.

But now those wars are over, and the Great Depression is just a memory, so why do the works of so many authors from this period remain listed among the classics? In an attempt to explore this question, this post is the gateway to a short series of posts exploring the narrative styles of Dashiell Hammet, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and others. It will analyze each author’s individual style, and theorize why their contributions have survived.

Through the study of these three writers, pillars of the Hardboiled Crime genre, perhaps we may begin to understand the intrinsic strengths of this genre, strengths which are now sometimes found buried beneath layers of cliché. By understanding the source of cliché we may be able to uncover a new appreciation for the genre. With this deeper appreciation of its roots, we may be inspired to seek a higher level of literary accomplishment for modern-day suspense and mystery writers.

For several years Hammett cut his teeth writing for Black Mask, taking his own experiences working as a detective for the Pinkerton Agency and turning them into stories. It was at Black Mask that Hammett introduced an unnamed character referred to as "the Continental Op", the antithesis of glamorous all-knowing investigators. This detective lacked the eloquence of Sherlock Holmes, but his rough speech and matter-of-fact attitude became incredibly popular with the reading public. Hammett incorporated "Op" into a full-length novel in 1928 called Red Harvest. The voice in Red Harvest was both penetrating and off-the-cuff. The raw and unadorned style of this psychological thriller became known as "hard boiled".

"If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood simple like the natives," says the Op. "I've arranged a killing or two in my time, when they were necessary. But this is the first time I've ever got the fever" (142-3).

As Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton point out in “Towards a Definition of Film Noir”, prior to World War II convention dictated a beautiful heroine and an honest hero; we expected a clear line between good and bad, as well as clear motives, and the action should develop logically. But similar to his other writing, Dashiell Hammett's 1930 Hardboiled Crime novel The Maltese Falcon delivers a flawed hero with a murderous heroine. There is no Superman with a chaste fiancée, but somehow still we care about them; we seem to have misplaced our moral compass.

Although Dashiell Hammet produced only five novels he is remembered as one of the most influential writers of his time. While the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels gave us the arm-chair sleuth who solved crime at a safe distance from danger, Hammett gave us somewhat less-than-glamorous realism. Hammett's 1934 novel The Thin Man was repeatedly censored for its depiction of a couple living a liquor-soaked open. Because of Hammet's explorations in realism, the hard boiled genre represented a serious response to the urban culture of the day.

Raymond Chandler summarized Hammett's accomplishments:

"Hammett was the ace performer... He is said to have lacked heart; yet the story he himself thought the most of [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”

David Madden frequently referred to James M. Cain as "the twenty-minute egg of the hardboiled school." Cain's writing style is hard boiled, pared down to essential phrases with terse, almost brutal simplicity.

However, Cain resented the categorization and stated he merely tried to write the way real people talk. He further explained his writing style:

"I, so far as I can sense the pattern of my mind, write of the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept, at least to my imagination. I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box."

The content of Cain's forbidden box, according to W. M. Frohock in The Novel of Violence in America: 1920-1950 "invariably turns out to be sex, experienced with perfect animal intensity, sometimes with a little hint of the abnormal or the forbidden about it."

Although Cain kept his stance, insisting to Zinsser and other interviewers his interest was not in violence, Frohock argued "sex, so conceived, is inseparable from violence. Violence is at once associated with the sexual act itself, and made an inevitable accompaniment of anything which tends to frustrate the sexual experience. In addition violence stimulates sexual activity, as in the scene of Nick's murder [The Postman Always Rings Twice]. For Cain, sex and violence are not so much subjects as necessary accessories of the plot."

In It's Chinatown, Kevin Starr describes the typical Cain story:

"A Cain story rushes forward with the headlong pace of a writer who has left everything save narrative on the cutting room floor. Yet we put Cain down with a conviction of social density and accomplished experience; for he triggers in us an act of imaginative cooperation. Convinced that Cain's fables of lust, murder and money are true to the epistructure of life in the urban-industrial complex, the reader amplifies and visualizes the details, like a director working from the bare bones of a story line.... Hollywood transformed Cain's cinematic narratives into great movies, and the movies in turn conferred upon the Cain canon a more ample and substantial life than it would have had on its own. Reading Cain, then, is a mixed media event . . ." (pp. 31-2)

The narrative in a James M. Cain novel almost never stops the showing to tell. He is overtly tough in diction and action. In The Postman Always Rings Twice Frank and Cora have just murdered her husband Nick. The narrative is quick, just the murder's essential actions, and ends with this scene:

"I began to fool with her blouse, to bust the buttons, so she would look banged up. She was looking at me, and her eyes didn't look blue, they looked black. I could feel her breath coming fast. Then it stopped, and she leaned real close to me.

'Rip me! Rip me!'

I ripped her. I shoved my hand in her blouse and jerked. She was wide open, from her throat to her belly.

'You got that climbing out. You caught it in the door handle.'

My voice sounded queer, like it was coming out of a tin phonograph.

'And this you don't know how you got.'

I hauled off and hit her in the eye as hard as I could. She went down. She was right there at my feet, her eyes shining, her breasts trembling, drawn up in tight points, and pointing right up at me. She was down there, and the breath was roaring in the back of my throat like I was some kind of a animal, and my tongue was all swelled up in my mouth, and blood pounding in it.

'Yes! Yes, Frank, yes!'

Next thing I knew, I was down there with her, and we were staring in each other's eyes, and locked in each other's arms, and straining to get closer. Hell could have opened for me then, and it wouldn't have made any difference. I had to have her, if I hung for it. I had her."

Of his generation's tough-guy writers, Hammett and Chandler included, Cain offers the most brutal, elemental, and deeply pessimistic view of human events and possibilities. His narrative has the impersonal objectivity of the camera eye. Aesthetic distance is created from his neutral and dispassionate attitude toward the basic elements of his novels. These techniques force us back to the pure experience itself.

"Cain and other hard-boiled writers," Madden explained, "wrote not only about but mainly to the masses, giving violent impetus to their forbidden dreams, dramatizing their darkest temptations and their basic physical drives."

William Rose Benet likened Cain's characters to the people you read about in the daily newspapers. "They are chiefly stupid, slightly pathetic, capable of rape, arson, or murder in a sort of dumb, driven way. They have glimmers of decency, passions that overcome them, and are chiefly selfish and morally composed of gelatin while being big, husky brutes to outward view."

Cain's novels were populated with, if not realistic, at least life-like characters. Like other novelists of the 1930s, Cain moved to Hollywood to write for the movies. But once there, he looked around and noted what he saw. Although he had tried to write fiction for more than a decade prior, this reflection on his surroundings produced his breakthrough with the 1934 publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice, arguably one of the finest moments of depression literature.

Raymond Chandler has been labeled American literature's finest writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. His first novel The Big Sleep contained language foreign to the pulp fiction which gave it birth. It’s a tough, cynical language, but with a touch of poetry; Marlowe’s consideration of death (the “big sleep” of the title) echoes Hamlet’s “To sleep, perchance to dream- ay, there’s the rub.” Hamlet (III, i, 65-68):

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.”

Ross Macdonald, Chandler's admirer and literary heir declared in his introduction to Matthew J. Bruccoli's Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald: A Checklist Chandler was a "slumming angel" who transformed the detective story into a critique of American culture's more base aspects. Chandler’s signature style featured bare, sparse, ironic sentences. His narrative conveyed a feeling many subsequent authors have tried to forge.

"She wore brownish speckled tweeds, a mannish shirt and tie, hand-carved walking shoes. Her stockings were just as sheer as the day before, but she wasn't showing as much of her legs. Her black hair was glossy under a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost fifty dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter."

Often, plot and characterization are rocketed forward in the span of a few sentences. Chandler’s descriptions paint vivid characters using a minimum of words:

“Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has anymore moral sense than a cat. Neither have I. No Sternwood ever had.”

Even though Chandler's heroes changed little, remaining the same grizzled romantics holding to an ideal of gallantry, his storytelling developed through important changes. In the 1930s Chandler's stories centered more and more on the protagonists' struggle toward moral equilibrium. In the 1935 novel Killer in the Rain Chandler increased the hero's alienation and ethical predicament through first-person narration, a technique often borrowed by later authors.

But Chandler himself reworked devices from his predecessor Dashiell Hammett. While more verbally adventurous than Hammett, Chandler borrowed his hero-as-narrator device while producing an original narrative pattern which blended underworld vernacular with poetry. As Peter Wolfe wrote in Something More than Night: The Case of Raymond Chandler, Chandler created a darkly lyrical prose that turned his stories into "metaphors of the urban nightmare."

Chandler worked to move detective fiction away from the "whodunit" mentality. In his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler lambasted the fashionable whodunits as "middling-dull, pooped-out piece[s] of utterly unreal and mechanical fiction," and he advocated the study of crimes rooted in "the seamy side of things"--of murders perpetrated by "the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse."

Chandler left a legacy of evocative power and metaphoric energy to the regional literature of southern California, making it stand as an emblem of the latent pathologies of American life. He created enduring images of the dark forces of contemporary experience.

Biographer Frank MacShane summarized Chandler's achievement by calling him "a prophet of modern America," one whose vision "has become increasingly fulfilled."

Today the intricacies of publishing and distribution are executed at speeds never before attained. With this speed comes an efficiency which keeps publishing costs down, so books are available to a previously unimaginable mass market. This speed and access to media has also shortened the average reader's attention span, so today's bestseller is often forgotten tomorrow. With this speed a pressure is placed upon publishers to meet the public's demand for new and exciting fiction.

Writers must become sensations overnight, and then they are forgotten as quickly. Gone are the magazines and pulp fiction houses where young writers were once nurtured; a new writer must spring forth on the scene fully developed, like a literary Venus on the half shell. With the rush to create a frenzy, to write the book with the biggest buzz, writers and publishing houses sometimes place quantity before quality; the author who can crank out the most books with the most plot twists, wins. The writer who can appeal to the broadest common denominator becomes a household name, at a time when names can become part of a household overnight.

This Venus mentality deprives authors of places where their writing can grow. Magazines like Black Mask, which developed writers like Hammett and Chandler, have fallen along the wayside. The pulp fiction publications which nurtured James M. Cain have disappeared and there does not seem to be a large-scale replacement in sight. Because stories can now be so easily published in books, magazines have turned to other mass-appeal topics. Small publishing houses cannot compete with the mega mass market publishers, and have turned to other material. But while today’s Venus novelists might appear on the scene, and in the book racks, fully grown, are they fully mature as well? Is it possible for them to be fully mature without the requisite time for development?

A new novel can appear in homes across the country in a matter of days. So if an author achieves overnight success on such a large scale, will that author often have the motivation necessary to deepen their craft? It doesn't seem likely. There isn’t time, since the first book will soon be forgotten and another must be written to take its place. What once seemed a blessing, the ability to mass produce and distribute large amounts of fiction, may have become the literary world's ultimate curse.

Hardboiled Crime fiction of the depression era was born of unique circumstances in the publishing world, nourished by the unique and imaginative responses of its writers. But without a similar place to grow, the mystery-suspense genre is not likely to see such innovation as that of Hammett, Cain, and Chandler.

Click here for more posts in this series on Hardboiled Crime Fiction.

Two Ways to Laugh, Two Ways to Live

2009-08-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

"There was a string," he says.

From the twinkle in his eyes I know he thinks this is a good one.

"There was a string, and he was in a bar."

He draws in close, uncomfortably close if he wasn't so young. He climbs half onto my lap.

"But the bartender said he didn't serve strings, so the string had to go."

He is silent a moment, but some wheel is still churning, still winding his inner spring tight in anticipation.

To him, he is building suspense.

"The string tied himself in a knot and untwisted his end. And he went back in the bar and the bartender said, 'Didn't I say we don't serve strings?'"

The spring inside him is reaching its breaking point. He hasn't told the punchline yet, but he almost can't contain himself. I barely make out what he says.

"The string said, 'I'm a frayed knot!'"

That's the end, both of the joke and his composure as he melts into a fit of giggles. But I'm far more amused by the telling than the tale.

Children don't wait to develop their best material before telling a joke. They'll use whichever one is handy. It's more about getting to tell a joke. It's about having someone's undivided attention for a minute or two, and most important of course, it's about getting to laugh.

It isn't until we're older that we learn to wait. We must only tell the funniest jokes. Otherwise, what will people think of us?

We carry that waiting into other parts of our lives as well. We must only tell the best stories, we must only share our best writing. It isn't about the process anymore, it's all about the results.

I heard somewhere there are two kinds of humor. One depends totally on a punchline, and if you blow that you've blown the entire thing. The other depends on little laughs along the way and there might not even be a punchline, at least not in the traditional sense.

That second kind of humor is considered safe. It depends on enjoying the process and so it's difficult to blow that one.

The first kind banks on results. It's risky; it could fall flat.

Isn't life the same way?

Image: Zanastardust

Writer or Ignoramus?

2009-08-04T06:04:00.000-07:00

In The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, legendary writing teacher John Gardner said:

“Though the literary dabbler may write a fine story now and then, the true writer is one for whom technique has become, as it is for the pianist, second nature. Ordinarily this means university education, with courses on the writing of fiction, and poetry as well.”

Gardner allows that Earnest Hemingway “is quoted as having said that the way for a writer to learn his craft is to go away and write.” However, he also reminds us Hemingway “went away for free ‘tutorials’ to two of the finest teachers then living, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein.”

Gardner goes on to say, “No ignoramus – no writer who has kept himself innocent of education – has ever produced great art.”

In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King says:

“This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do – not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.”

What are your thoughts? If writers need professional training, yet bullshit abounds in the world of writers' training, where can writers learn to write?

A Pedagogy for Creative Writing

2009-08-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

You stare at the blank page while ideas spin around in your head, but none of them seem able to find their way to the page. Sometimes it feels like there are no words present and other times the words are there but they’re disjointed, disembodied. All the while that little voice inside is chanting about what a failure you are, how you’ll never be good enough. Maybe you’ve done it before but that was just a fluke, and it will never happen again.

Other tasks call you away, or at least you pretend they do. No point staying at this pointless exercise again right now. Maybe you should just go read the classifieds and find a real job. Writing isn’t for you anyway, and this proves it.

Other times the words just flow. You write with your hair flying in the wind. Oh that your fingers could move faster, but to your great joy the muse is patient today and allows you time to catch all those precious words she whispers to you, and only to you, the one who is a writer.

You can see yourself doing this for the rest of your life, this act of creative expression, of communion with the world, and even with the universe.

These two sides of you, the failure and the writer, coexist inside. You never really know which one will raise its head on any given day. So you begin to create theories about writing and how to write. You believe this will allow you to step back and make it happen on days when the process eludes you.

At the close of a day when the words flowed, when that day’s writing task is completed and you linger in the afterglow of success, you look around the room and memorize each little thing about it. You close all the windows so your muse cannot escape. You refuse to move a single thing because these are the circumstances which led to a wonderful communion with writing.

Perhaps it was the pen, or the paper, or the lighting. Perhaps it was the particular flavor of tea you chose this morning or the brand of coffee. You take copious mental notes so the experience might be there next time for you to summon it.

On one of the days when you feel you can’t write your way out of a brown paper bag you order that little writing manual you’ve heard about, and promise to memorize all the rules; one rule a day should suffice. You chastise yourself for not remembering all the wisdom your high school English teacher tried so earnestly to impart: the five-paragraph essay, correct sentence structure, and all those things you should never leave dangling, whatever they are called.

Because so many have found a refuge in the rules, a framework which gives shape to our words when we paste them to it, we sometimes cling to the idea of rules as a structure for organizing words; we view the writer as a technician with a toolbox to open and apply against any given set of words.

Then when the words seem to flow from nothing we cling to the notion words are floating in the air and all we have to do is open ourselves to them; we believe it is our responsibility to get out of the way and be a tunnel.

“If you learn to clear your mind the words can flow through you, landing on the page.”

“If you understand the mechanics and the rules you can always get the words written.”

And the writing world has built encampments on these opposing sides and at night each side looks across the battlefield and contemplates those looking back from over there. They wonder how anyone can call those people writers, those people who do such a thing and make such a travesty of writing.

Then in the morning each side looks into the faces of their comrades and gains courage saying, “We are the ones in the right. We are the true writers.”

However, both ways of thinking share something in common. Whether entrenched in rules or combing thin air for words, both sides have come to depend on their individual methods without realizing how these are a set of rituals based on what may or may not have worked before. They have tried to hold the writing process in a jar and mistaken this set of rituals for a definable writing technique.

But each ritual adds another cog to the writing machine and instead of writing we find ourselves worrying about cogs.

John Gardner once told an interviewer, “Writing is the only religion I have.”

If writing is a religion, then the writer’s set of rituals defines their particular denomination.

But religion is only a lens we view life through; it is not life itself. Likewise, rituals are only a set of actions attempting to guide the writing process, and they are not the writing itself. Religion does not provide us with the life, and ritual does not provide us with the words.

We must have another means of producing words, a solid and dependable writing technique that guides us in a way ritual never could.

Image: fauxto_digit

The Writer and the Road

2009-08-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

I drove behind a motorcycle for awhile today and thought again of Pershig's metaphor from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pershig's motorcycle journey presented a metaphor for life, but I've been considering its relevance to writing.

I wondered how the motorcyclist's experience of the road differed from mine. Perhaps he could enjoy the warm August day on some different level. His experience would certainly be different from mine on an icy day in January.

Then it occurred to me the common thing on both the summer and the winter roads would be the motorcycle and the rider. No matter what road passed underneath the motorcycle, it and the rider would remain the same.

In life, no matter what road passes beneath us we remain the same person.

In writing, we are the same writer regardless of the road. That road could be the story, the format, or the genre. That road could be the circumstances behind or surrounding our writing, it could be a client, or an audience but the constant is the writer.

So the question I ask is, why do I often try to change with the road?

Image: -just-jen-

Zen and the Art of Writing

2009-07-31T21:02:00.000-07:00

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig’s motorcycle was not the newest and best and he did not have training as a mechanic. But despite the obstacles Pirsig rode his motorcycle across the country.

"Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it's some kind of a "knack" or some kind of "affinity for machines" in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a "short between the earphones," failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself."

Pirsig’s technique was a practiced use of reason, and his technique was honed by the road itself.

Could the same process which carried Pirsig’s motorcycle across the country create a writer?

Image: filtran

Could Your Creative Work Be The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread?

2009-07-28T01:37:00.000-07:00

Creativity can be a valuable commodity.

In 1912, a man named Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa invented a machine capable of slicing an entire loaf of bread in one motion. Fire destroyed Rohwedder’s workshop and this machine, and a second slicer wasn’t built until 1928.

But did the history of bread then change in 1928? Not really. The slicing machines were not an immediate hit. The sliced loaves looked sloppy and went stale quicker. Gustav Papendick of St. Louis perfected the machine so the bread would be more neat and orderly, packed quickly in wax paper to avoid some of the staleness. But bakers doubted consumers would put up with bread that goes stale quickly, just so they wouldn’t have to slice it, and bakeries were not quick to order the extra equipment.

But in 1930 Wonder took presliced bread national and it went on to become a touchstone for “greatest things.”

Who do you think profited more financially from the invention, Rohwedder or Wonder?

Back in 1912 Rohwedder must not have realized what he had or it wouldn’t have taken him 16 years to build another. Evidently, in 1928 the baking industry didn’t recognize the machine’s potential either.

Wonder was the company who took the ball and ran with it.

In fact, several of the world’s most wealthy companies have built their fortunes upon the shoulders of others. Starbuck’s did not invent the latte but they capitalized on the idea, perhaps more successfully than anyone so far. Ray Kroc did not invent the hamburger, the way McDonald’s produces them, or the idea of hamburger franchises but he has profited more from these ideas than the McDonald’s brothers themselves. Bill Gates didn’t invent the DOS operating system or the idea of a GUI or graphic user interface (Microsoft Windows is a GUI) yet because of these two things Gates is among the richest men in the world.

But on the other hand . . .

Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame, based on the antics of his own “colorful” aunt, was rejected by 15 publishers before it not only became a Broadway hit but a popular film. In 1956 Dennis was the first author in history to have three books simultaneously on The New York Times bestseller list.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull author Richard Bach received 18 rejection letters before the book was published and Bach sold more than a million copies.

Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, flagship book to the 65-title series which has sold more than 80 million copies in 37 languages, received 140 rejections.

Before a publisher took a chance on James Joyce, the young writer received 22 rejections. Only 1250 copies of Dubliners were initially published, and of the 379 copies which sold the first year, young James purchased 120. Subsequently, Joyce became regarded as one of the most influential 20^th century writers.

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was turned down 121 times and a novel by Richard Hooker called M*A*S*H was rejected by 21 publishers. Both have since made their creators wealthy.

Tabitha King rescued a manuscript from the trash, one for a novel about a tormented girl with telekinetic powers. Her husband had already received 30 rejections from publishers. But after it went around again, and was eventually published, Carrie became a classic in the horror genre and catapulted author Stephen King to success.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and Frank Herbert’s Dune all received rejections far into the double digits, yet each has become a household name.

Who will benefit from your next great idea? Will you listen to naysayers, or perhaps your own inner critic, and leave someone else to benefit from your creative work? Or will you remain tenacious?

Your creative work could be the next "greatest thing since sliced bread."

Photo: jaqian

Goldilocks and the Three Personal Development Gurus

2009-07-26T03:05:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was an up-and-coming performance artiste named Goldilocks.

One bright morning Goldilocks ventured into the deep dark woods to seek creative inspiration. She felt her work had lost its edge and her follower count on Twitter had plummeted.

Just when the hot afternoon sun started making her tired, Goldilocks came across a cottage with a large sign hung over the door. It read "Personal Development Gurus." So after briefly contemplating what the plural spelling of "guru" might actually be, she knocked.

Nobody answered the door.

"I am very sleepy," she thought. "I'm sure nobody will mind if I wait inside. Perhaps I could take a nap while I wait."

Inside the cottage there were three of nearly everything. One big, one medium-sized, and one small version.

"How odd," she said feeling perfectly comfortable in her sense of self, yet being totally open to the idea of different-ness.

Although she realized this could be interpreted as buying into society's belief that "bigger is better," Goldilocks was so very tired and decided to take a rest in the biggest of the three chairs.

As soon as Goldilocks sat down loud music and a voice blasted over a loudspeaker.

"Get on your feet!" the speaker boomed. "Put some lotion in your motion and GO, GO, GO, GO!"

She jumped up from the chair, her heart racing.

"Oh my goodness!" she cried. "That's the biggest bunch of hype and hoopla I ever did hear!"

Goldilocks sat on the middle-sized chair to catch her breath. Nothing happened. As a matter of fact, it was so quiet she could hear crickets chirping outside. Her mind wandered and soon she forgot why she had even set out into the forest in the first place.

The third chair was smaller than the rest but Goldilocks wanted to prove she did not harbor prejudices against persons of smaller stature, so she felt obligated to give it a sit.

"Hmm," she said. "The seat is pretty comfortable. Not too hard, but not too soft either."

Just then a pillow appeared on the back of the chair. She rested her head against it. Next an ottoman appeared from nowhere. She put her feet up on it. Right after that, a classic self-help book by a trusted author appeared on a stand beside the chair, along with a glass of champagne.

"Now this chair knows how to treat a lady!" she said. And she guzzled the glass of champagne right down.

Goldilocks read from the self-help book until late in the afternoon. Although she had realized several personal insights, Goldilocks remembered hadn't had a bite to eat all day.

"I am so very hungry," she said.

So Goldilocks ventured into the kitchen to find herself something to eat.

Now the champagne had made her a little tipsy so she didn't trust her eyes at first, but across the kitchen there appeared to be a table with three steaming bowls of soup.

Goldilocks made a beeline for the largest bowl and peered down inside. It was alphabet soup. Not only that, but the letters seemed to be spelling out some message.

She read, "You're okay and I'm okay. You're special just like you are. Sign up for our Love Yourself Retreat today and we'll double your crackers back and throw in a bonus spoon."

Goldilocks pushed the bowl away in disgust.

"If that isn't the biggest crock of cliches I ever did see!" she exclaimed.

Goldilocks looked into the second bowl. It had a message too, but it lacked a concrete plan with actionable steps.

"I just don't know what you want me to do," she said and moved on to the smaller bowl.

"Wouldn't you like some nice warm soup?" read the letters in the third bowl.

"Why, yes. Yes I believe I would," Goldilocks said. Then she ate the soup right down, realizing of course that comfort food wasn't the answer to her problems but feeling a need to just be present with her inner self.

Still a little drunk from the champagne and pleasingly full of delicious soup, Goldilocks ventured upstairs to take a little nap.

Goldilocks opened the bedroom door. The room contained three beds, one big, one middle-sized, and one small.

"My momma didn't raise no dummy," she said. "I ain't gonna go through all that rigmarole again."

And with that Goldilocks dove onto the smallest bed and had herself a nice little nap.

When the personal development gurus arrived home, Goldilocks was surprised to see they were three bears, one was big, one medium-sided, and one small. Feeling intense guilt over her species-centric assumptions and wishing to honor the contribution every person being can make toward enriching our general life experiences, Goldilocks hired all three to coach her.

When Goldilocks returned home she felt a new sense of self and purpose. She created a new performance piece and was invited to present it on the Oprah show. The number of people following her on Twitter increased dramatically, so of course she lived happily ever after.

Life and Blogging Without Regrets

2009-07-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

In the song "Beautiful Boy" John Lennon wrote:

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

In a recent comment Count Sneaky wrote:

. . . life is so time-consuming.

Some people say you shouldn't apologize when you've been away from your blog, unexplained. I'm not sure why, maybe it's some sort of "no regrets" blogging philosophy.

But I am sorry to have been away so long without telling you why. Life had other plans, but I won't bore you with too many details. Suffice it to say my dad passed away a month ago after a two-year cancer battle and my Master's thesis had to be completed by the end of June, so I really didn't feel much like blogging. However, I did spend a lot of time playing Farmtown on Facebook.

Oh sure, I posted some "articles" . . . things I had to write anyway for school, but that isn't the same thing. For the most part my blogging life sat on the shelf, then I realized something interesting.

Emma Newman contacted me the other day. She remembered I had mentioned some difficult times and wondered if I was doing okay. That might not sound too interesting, but let me put this into context: I've never met Emma and had only exchanged a few blog comments with her. She was just being human and wondered how another human happened to be doing.

Who says the Internet is anonymous? Several of the other great people who know me through blogging have continued to stop by and leave comments even though my posts have been less than regular.

That's when I decided to reject the "no regrets" thing. Would you suddenly stop interacting with your brick-and-mortar friends without some explanation? Of course not, if you value their friendships. If you value those who frequent your blog, isn't it the same thing? If it isn't, then perhaps it really is all about statistics anyway.

I suppose appreciating the value of those who come across your path is the real way to living a life without regrets. Someone said:

Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for awhile and leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same.

Photo: Gregor D..

Cinematic Narration and Shakespeare’s Plays

2009-07-06T02:49:00.000-07:00

Many of the limitations William Shakespeare faced in the technical facilities of the Elizabethan stage are answered in the nature and abilities of modern film. Where Shakespeare seemed to yearn for a way to express the true colors of his vision through words, film offers a ready palette and the ability to "show" what Shakespeare could only "tell." Shakespeare's theater, with its lack of technical resources, painted verbal pictures of battlefields and fantastical places, scenes and exchanges in a span of places from the underworld to the heavens, and snapshots of a character's inner thoughts and feelings, entirely through words. By its nature and technical abilities film has a broader visual vocabulary available to it than Shakespeare's theater could ever access.

In Henry V the chorus laments the limitations of Shakespeare's Elizabethan stage:

. . . Can this cock-pit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram,
Within this wooden O, the very casques,
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! Since a crooked figure may
Attest, in little place, a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.

In director and actor Kenneth Branagh's 1989 film adaptation of Henry V, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, preeminent British classical actor of the first post-Olivier generation, Derek Jacobi spoke these words of the chorus' prologue from the backstage of a modern theater. Jacobi's speech ended on the stage, where the play's opening scene is expected to begin. However this scene is not in fact filmed on a stage, but on a 15^th Century battlefield. By filming the opening sequence in this manner, Branagh both acknowledges and shatters the limitations Shakespeare faced on his Elizabethan stage, and opens a door for the cinematic narrator to offer its unique and virtually unlimited contribution to the production.

In a similar manner, Branagh's 2006 adaptation of Shakespeare's As You Like It takes us behind the scenes of its actual filming when Rosalind (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) delivers the play's epilogue among the actors' trailers and the general hubbub of the crew. Film's ability to break the fourth wall opens new realms for the cinematic narrator, bringing an intimacy between actor, filmmaker, and audience which Shakespeare could only experience in his dreams. This intimacy introduces the other end of a spectrum available to the cinematic narrator, ranging from spectacle to minute detail, and outlines its possible contribution to the filming of Shakespeare's plays.

But the modern cinematic narrator's contribution to the filming of Shakespeare's plays is not merely technical. The cinematic voice is the product of its own day and age just as much as the voice of Shakespeare. In "Shakespeare and the Cinema," Russell Jackson, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, observes:

To an extent, the history of Shakespearian film-making is one of variations on this theme: shifting attitudes to the Shakespearian source material, varied objectives, and changing techniques.

So the adaptation of Shakespeare to film serves the needs of both play and filmmaker, and the cinematic narration developed for each individual film will be dictated by the attitudes, objectives and techniques applied to the material.

The Shakespearean canon offers a nearly comprehensive palette of human emotion and experience with ready-made scenarios to match each filmmaker's objective. However, public opinion about the individual plays continues to change. The play As You Like It, although neglected in performance for more than a century after Shakespeare's death in 1616, has been a popular play on the stage ever since. Although The Taming of the Shrew remains one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed comedies, interpretation of the play's commentary about women changes with the times. While few would dispute the numerous merits of The Merchant of Venice, its anti-Semitic themes have caused the work to fall out of fashion at times when these themes could not be readily justified. Attitudes about Shakespeare himself continue to change throughout the years; while he is often hailed as a great genius who has made numerous contributions to the English language as well as our overall understanding of humanity and the individual, at other times even his existence has been called into question and William Shakespeare has been thought to be the compiled penname for several writers of the Elizabethan stage.

In an interview for his 2006 film adaptation of As You Like It, director Kenneth Branagh spoke of his objectives for filming Shakespeare:

I felt as though I was watching Shakespeare across the generations and in a new medium - - sort of waving the flag and saying, We're not telling you this is better than anything you'll ever see but we think it's wonderful.

By nature of its creative flexibility, film opens the door to radical objectives and the use of distinctive narrative voices. Director Baz Luhrmann's 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet sought to update the play with a radical approach intended to appeal to a broad audience. However, it may be argued this adaptation pales in comparison to Franco Zeffirelli's unforgettable 1968 film, which handled the material in a more traditional manner and is now considered a film classic. Addressing this capacity, and perhaps implying some restraint should be exercised in its use, Kenneth Branagh said:

When you make a film of a subject that existed in another medium - particularly in the theatre, where it's worked as a play for four hundred years - I think one is obliged to consider what the cinema can do to reveal the story of the play that the theatre can't do in the same way. I'm not suggesting one is better than the other, but simply, what can the medium do? Why do it in the cinema?

While the quality and influence of Shakespeare's plays may be a common reason they are adapted into film, these works have also been used as vehicles for promoting and preserving the work of individual actors. Sir Laurence Olivier's film performances of Shakespeare, which include King Lear (1983), Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), As You Like It (1936), Richard III (1955), and The Merchant of Venice (1973) are currently valued more for their preservation of work by such a legendary actor than their other cinematic merits.

It could be said Shakespeare's plays lend themselves to screen adaptation more readily than scripts from modern theater. A modern play frequently must be "opened up" so the visual narrative of film may be more fully applied, even though this process of opening is likely to superimpose new ideas onto the original play. Where modern theater seems to have been influenced by cinema and television, presenting dialogue virtually void of descriptive language, the plays of William Shakespeare give us language rich in narrative. With Shakespeare's plays the material for cinematic narration is often readily available in the existing text and may simply be translated into an artistic and effective visual representation. Coupled with modern cinema's technical capacities, the wealth of description present in much of Shakespeare's work may be more fully appreciated and realized than could ever have been possible on the Elizabethan stage.

But for all the literary and descriptive quality of Shakespeare's plays, they may be more effective as film when careful consideration is given to the development of an appropriate cinematic narrator and that narrator is given a clear voice in the film's execution. The plays have been filmed countless times and with varied amounts of cinematic intervention. On the one hand we have extreme makeovers such as the 1999 film Ten Things I Hate About You, based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew but set in a modern high school and rewritten in prose. Franco Zeffirelli's film version of Romeo and Juliet stayed much closer to the original, both the text and the setting. Both films can claim success on very different levels, but they share the benefit of a strong directorial vision translated into a distinctive style and use of cinematic narration. Russell Jackson said:

Films based on Shakespeare's plays are best considered in terms of their vision - that is, the imaginary world they create, and the way of seeing it that they offer the viewer rather than the degree of their faithfulness to a Shakespearean original.

One of the most obvious characteristics in any of Shakespeare's plays is his use of language, and in particular his use of blank verse. Actors on the Elizabethan stage did not enjoy the benefits of electronic amplification, so clarity was a major concern of any playwright when assigning words to an actor. Like other playwrights of his day, Shakespeare employed the use of iambic pentameter when constructing his lines. Iambic pentameter depends on an oral rhythm which approximates natural speech but almost magically makes it easier for an audience to hear and understand. Each line contains a series of alternating weak and strong stresses on its words. The combination of one weak and one strong syllable creates what is called a foot, and each line contains five such feet. Built upon iambic pentameter, blank verse was a helpful tool for the Elizabethan stage, but not an obvious one for modern film. Consequently, many filmmakers place little importance on their actors' use of these elements in the blank verse even though Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter often carries instruction to the actors and hints about his intended meanings. A modern filmmaker may decide to ignore how and why Shakespeare used blank verse, but he does so at his own peril and his final interpretation of the work might suffer.

Antony's famous speech from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is written in blank verse. In general, when a Shakespearean actor comes across a line which seems to have more or less than five feet, it is likely an adjustment should be made in pronunciation. For example, in Antony's speech, the word "ambitious" is pronounced with four syllables and not three like we generally use today. The word "interred" is meant to contain three syllables as well, indicated by the number of feet in the line. But if you allow the form to flow, without fighting the rhythms, not only is it easier to hear the lines, but you begin to hear Shakespeare's own acting directions, like which word is stressed and therefore important; often the stresses in a line can change or at least clarify the meaning. The stress given to the word "ambitious" throughout the speech, both by the number of syllables and the frequency of repetition, is underscored by the rhythm. We see this is a speech about ambition, but not necessarily about the ambition of Caesar. Because it is stressed, and repeated, then followed by "Yet Brutus is an honorable man" we get the idea Antony might actually be saying Brutus was the ambitious one, and not Caesar.

Another obvious characteristic of Shakespeare's language is its descriptive qualities. Because the Elizabethan stage did not use more than the most minimal bits of scenery to depict location and time of day, playwrights alluded to such details through the dialogue. Dialogue was also used to describe events which might be difficult to depict on the stage, or to relay information which the characters on stage might not otherwise be privy to. Because film carries such a wide range of possibilities, anything from voiceovers and flashbacks to quick editing and the ability to bring any time or feeling into the scene, Shakespeare's allusions within the text, although they are often beautiful, may easily be handed off to the cinematic narrator's duties. What remains next is for the filmmaker to decide if this descriptive dialogue is necessary, or if it becomes redundant when these things can be shown in other ways.

Aside from a lack of scenery, the Elizabethan stage's use of costuming was minimal as well and actors generally wore "modern dress" whether the play took place in Elizabethan England or ancient Rome. Modern film actors are usually dressed in costumes accurate to the story's time and culture, again reducing the need for descriptive language which identifies a play's locale. Modern filmmakers often stray from the setting Shakespeare intended for his plays, adding yet another discretionary element to the director's plate and another instance where the original language might best be cut. Director Michael Hoffman's 1999 film adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream changes the location from Greece to Italy and moves the time a few hundred years from its original era. Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It sets the tale in a British enclave of feudal Japan.

It is impossible to know how Shakespeare himself might approach the filming of his plays if he were alive today, of course. Freed from the constraints of his Elizabethan stage, we can only guess what the Bard of Avon might have given us. Perhaps he would have left out much of the descriptive sections within his plays, or maybe he would retain them for their poetic contributions. Of course Shakespeare would realize an almost unlimited palette of times and locations for his plays, but perhaps he would have rejected their importance and focused even more on the interactions between characters. Or perhaps Shakespeare would have transferred a portion of his writing from the pen to the camera, using each tool for its inherent strengths and understanding their weaknesses. What we do know is the cinematic narration in a modern film may be used to enhance what we already have in Shakespeare's plays, the only challenge comes in knowing where and how much of the focus to give that narrator.

Works cited.

Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen. "Film Narrative and the Other Arts." Film Theory & Criticism. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 341-344.

Jackson, Russell. "Shakespeare and the Cinema." The Cambridge Companion To Shakespeare. Ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 217-233.

"Lawrence Olivier." IMDb: The Internet Movie Database. IMDb.com, 1990-2009. 05 July, 2009. < http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000059/>

"Online Exclusive With Kenneth Branagh." HBO Films. HBO Films, 2006. 05 July, 2009. < http://www.hbo.com/films/asyoulikeit/interviews/>

Shakespeare, William. "Henry V." The Globe Illustrated Shakespeare. Ed. Howard Staunton. New York: Greenwich House, 1979.

Satire in the English Renaissance Pastoral

2009-06-30T03:41:00.000-07:00

To today's reader, pastoral literature from the English Renaissance may remind us more of fairy tales and fables than pieces of great literature. Examples from this period are often relegated to the world of kitsch alongside porcelain shepherd and shepherdess salt and pepper shakers or the mediocre oil paintings of impossibly idealized bucolic country sides, second cousins to oil-on-velvet paintings of sad clowns and Elvis Presley. At first glance, the pastoral's ruffle-clad shepherdesses and pan-flute-playing shepherds generally fail to garner much of our literary respect or stir much of our interest, however "first glance" may not be a close enough inspection of this particular genre. These seemingly quaint fables are not in fact what they at first seem; the very fact pastorals occupied some of the greatest poetic minds of the English Renaissance could imply the form at one time spoke to something deeper and more substantial than a pan flute, courtly shepherd, or velvet Elvis ever could.

The English Renaissance pastoral might be better understood within a context of the rich literary traditions which preceded it; in the real world, a literary genre never springs forth fully developed like Venus in the half shell. The development of a literary genre requires the complex process of evolution, with each step in that evolution entirely dependent upon what has come before. To remove a genre such as the English Renaissance pastoral from its place within the context of history severely compromises our ability to understand that genre and its manifestation at any particular stage of its development.

Current literary scholarship routinely attaches the English Renaissance pastoral to its ancient roots, a rebirth of the genre brought about by the influential Renaissance humanism movement. One central feature of the Renaissance humanism movement was a commitment to study the primary sources of the best writing from ancient Greece and Rome. This commitment was summarized in the Renaissance humanists' motto "ad fontes", which means "to the sources". Renaissance humanists glorified the ancient civilizations and sought to both imitate and recreate the ideals of ancient literature. From this aim, the Renaissance pastoral emerged as a direct descendant of works by the Greek writer Theocritus, who may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds.

Theocritus' bucolic poetry represented the life of Sicilian shepherds living in an idealized natural setting reminiscent of the Golden age of Greek mythology, the highest in the Greek spectrum of Iron, Bronze, Silver, and Golden ages. Theocritus' shepherds lived in a time of peace and stability. He wrote in the Doric dialect but in dactylic hexameter, which had previously been associated with the Greek's most prestigious poetic form, epic poetry. This melding of simplicity and sophistication would later play a major role in the history of pastoral verse in the hands of Renaissance writers. The devices of these early pastorals were later adopted by the Roman poet Virgil, who adapted the genre into Latin with his Eclogues.

Virgil wrote about a more idyllic vision of rural life than Theocritus had done and was the first to set his poems in Arcadia. Arcadia, although an actual location, became highly idealized within the realms of literature and developed into the most popular location for ancient pastorals. Virgil presented a rural life more idyllic than what Theocritus had given; a distinction which gave the pastoral a foothold in the world of fantasy and opened the door to the use of allegory. He implemented the practice of exploiting the pastoral form to make clandestine insinuations about contemporary problems. Virgil's Eclogues contained a blend of visionary politics and eroticism, and his work was met with popular success in the Roman theatre, catapulting Virgil into fame and establishing him as a celebrity and a legend among his contemporaries.

In its simplest form, a pastoral represents a shepherd's life in a conventionalized manner. However, the Renaissance pastoral model was more involved than that. Its features included:

A fantastical world where the constraints of geography, nature, gender and time may become irrelevant and subverted.

Exiles from urban life who are outsiders from the Pastoral situation form the focus of the Pastoral Romance. Shepherds are not the primary focus.

When the exiles arrive in the countryside, they converse with the shepherds.

The urban characters often disguise themselves as country folk or shepherds.

Advantages and disadvantages of court and country are discussed; differences between the natural and the artificial are fundamental to the genre.

Pastoral Romances include songs, masques and disguises.

The Pastoral Romance celebrates rural simplicity, but in a highly stylized and artificial manner.

Discussion and examination between the concepts of nature and nurture are present throughout the Pastoral genre.

Pastoral figures are used to examine the evils of greed, cruelty, deceit, corruption and bribery through actions or discourse.

By the culmination of the play, the exiles are reintegrated into the urban life and order has been restored.

By providing an artificial realm through the imaginary forest and Shepherds, the Pastoral Romance provides its characters with an opportunity to see more clearly and therefore gives them the opportunity and freedom to change.

William Shakespeare made frequent use of the Pastoral, both through brief examples within works such as Love's Labor's Lost ("When icicles hang by the wall") and the Shearer's feast in The Winter's Tale or sustained examples like the play As You Like It. Other plays by Shakespeare contain individual pastoral scenes, such as the bandits in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Pastoral influence is also found within A Midsummer's Nights Dream and The Tempest.

Shakespeare drew from classic pastoral literature for the subject matter in As You Like It, specifically Lodge's pastoral romance, Rosalynde. Lodge's 1590 novel had adapted "The Tale of Gamelyn," a narrative poem from the 14th Century. Shakespeare's version gave characters greater depth than Lodge; he introduced humor into the story, and created new characters such as Jacques, Touchstone, William and Audrey.

The play's Phebe and Silvius appeared in Lodge's novel, but are stock pastoral figures as well. Within the classical pastoral, conventional shepherds and shepherdesses had occurred in pairs with names like Phoebe and Silvius or the alternate Phoebus and Silvia. In these traditional roles, the shepherd is lovelorn while the shepherdess is disdainful. The lovelorn shepherd laments the loss or disdain of his lady, either in solo lyric or eclogue (a dialogue between shepherds about the simple life). In As You Like It Silvius complains to Corin about his love's rejection and the lovelorn Orlando hangs lyrics about his own love from all the tree branches. Again true to the classic pastoral form, Phebe supplies the customary elegy for a dead shepherd by quoting Marlowe:

"Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might,
'Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?'"

As may be expected, Shakespeare was not content to merely use the Pastoral in his works but his contribution further developed the genre. As You Like It utilizes many of the thematic and dramatic requirements of the Pastoral:

Corruption of family and court forces several characters into exile and the Forest of Arden, thereby creating a platform where questions of nature, nurture and nobility may be raised.

Cross-gender disguise is employed and allows Rosalind to freely discuss love and relationships with Orlando.

As You Like It contains more songs than any of Shakespeare's other plays.

The play features a wedding masque with the god of marriage, Hymen. Supernatural elements were important to the Pastoral genre.

Social (and gender) order is restored at the end. Duke Senior resumes his place at Court and the brothers Orlando and Oliver reunite. Rosalind casts off her male alter-ego (Ganymede) as well as the freedom of speech which accompanied that role.

For all its merit as an example of the Pastoral genre, the interpretation of As You Like It is not without problems. While some scholars have rated the play among Shakespeare's best, others do not see it as an equal within the Shakespearean canon. Critic such as Samuel Johnson and George Bernard Shaw did not believe As You Like It was a good example of Shakespeare's high artistry. Several scenes in As You Like It are essentially skits made up of songs and joking banter. Accenting the "You" in the title, Shaw theorized the play may have been written as a mere crowd pleaser, but one which did not particularly please Shaw. Even Leo Tolstoy remarked about the characters' immorality and took issue with Touchstone's constant clowning. On the other hand, American literary critic Harold Bloom believed Rosalind was one of Shakespeare's greatest and most fully realized female characters.

As You Like It, although neglected in performance for more than a century after Shakespeare's death in 1616, has been a popular play on the stage ever since. It was revived in England for the first time in 1723 in an adaptation called Love in a Forest. This version of the play interpolated passages from other Shakespearean dramas and comedies, notably A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare's original was restored to the theatre seventeen years later. In the 19th century As You Like It was staged by a number of eminent English actor-managers including Charles Kean and William Charles Macready. In late nineteenth century America, especially, the play became a favorite with audiences. Rosalind found noteworthy interpreters in Helena Modjeska, Mary Anderson, Ada Rehan, and Julia Marlowe.

But perhaps Shaw's observation about the play's title does provide insight and Shakespeare's play is a commentary on the theatrical tastes of Elizabethan England. For all its Pastoral elements As You Like It does not strictly adhere to conventions of the genre, but in fact appears to satirize them. The Forest of Arden is a place where Dukes have been usurped, brothers are deadly enemies, starvation, lions and deadly snakes lurk. For all the idyllic Pastoral qualities, Arden marries fantasy with a harsh reality. As a departure from the pastoral form, in As You Like It Shakespeare tempers the idyll of the sweetly picturesque pastoral scene with the adversity of the malcontented Jacques, as well as the unlikely pairing of Touchstone and Audrey, ensuring neither court life nor pastoral idyll is presented as either too sweet or too adverse. The play provides opportunities for its main characters to discuss love, aging, the natural world, and death from their particular points of view. It presents us with the worldviews of a chronically melancholy pessimist preoccupied with the negative aspects of life (Jacques), and Rosalind, who recognizes life's difficulties but holds fast to a positive attitude that is kind, playful, and above all, wise. Whatever Shakespeare's intent may have been for As You Like It, its composition does mark a turning point in his output as a playwright since; Shakespeare abandoned comedy soon after its completion and turned to the composition of his major tragedies.

Although current scholarship routinely attaches Renaissance Pastoral Literature to its ancient roots, and these connections are certainly valid, they stop short of realizing the influence of literature between the classical period and the European Renaissance. While it is evident Virgil introduced political allegory into his tales, this might not directly explain all the the techniques employed by Renaissance writers. To understand the English Renaissance pastoral it seems important to attach this technique to literature immediately preceding it. Without this important link in the genre's evolution we are apt to overlook its most important influences and our interpretation of works within this genre will not reflect their deeper meanings and purposes.

Before the pastoral gained widespread popularity, satire had already been established as a staple of Medieval English Literature. If we give the pastoral its proper place in the history and evolution of literature, the genre may seem less an enigma and more a continuation of the rich satirical tradition of Medieval and Early Renaissance writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Thomas More. Ignoring the satire's popularity in Medieval and Early Renaissance Europe may cause us to forget how the stage had been set when the pastoral rose to popularity in the 16th century. When viewed as a continuation of the satirical tradition Renaissance pastoral literature may be greater appreciated, and its sense of wit, style and daring may come into clearer focus.

Satirical poetry is believed to have been popular in Chaucer's time although little has survived. Examples of such poetry may still be seen in the bawdy lyrics of Carmina Burnana, set to music by Carl Orf in the 20th Century. The Canterbury Tales served as Chaucer's platform to satire blind religion and the thoughtless bigotry of his day.

Chaucer created "The Prioress' Tale" to satire the blind religion and thoughtless bigotry of his day. Chaucer lived in a time when religious stories thrived among a largely illiterate population. These stories were Saint's tales where the villains were impossibly bad and the heroes impossibly good. The line between "good" and "bad" people was drawn by their religious beliefs; anyone who believed in the Christian church was good, and everyone else in the world was bad.

Knowing nothing else of him, we can deduce from the rest of The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer is a talented writer, skilled in both subtlety of character and storytelling. So why would his Prioress tell a story so obviously shallow, improbable, and bigoted unless Chaucer labored behind some hidden agenda? Judging from his other stories, Chaucer doesn't seem squeamish about poking fun at hypocrisy in religion; he points to gullibility in religious devotion through "The Miller's Tale" as well as through those who purchase the Pardoner's "relics" in "The Pardoner's Tale." Further, history tells us Chaucer was part of a group of intellectuals who opposed the prevalent anti-Semitism of his time; in reality he would have been against characterizing Jews as "Satan's Hornet Nest".

Thomas More criticized the religious and political views of his contemporaries by obscuring his true intentions through the use of satire in Utopia (1516). Modern readers have come to understand a "utopia" as a paradise, a world built on higher ideals where the lamb lays down with the lion. As such, it would be natural to assume that in this book More had explained his designs for a more perfect world, with his own religious, political, and moral beliefs fulfilled. But in fact, the word "utopia" (which was coined by More himself from Latin) would be literally translated as "no place". By calling his dreamland "Utopia" More is betraying his story, showing it is a made up tale; he is literally calling it a place which does not and presumably cannot, exist. He further betrays his true view by the names he assigns to various characters and places within the story.

Thomas More wrote Utopia as a satire on his contemporaries' religious and political thoughts. The positive light given to religious, political and philosophical ideas diametrically opposed to those of the author, the presence of ridiculous wordplay in the names, titles and locations within the piece, and the pseudo Renaissance-humanist air given by setting the work in Latin, all reveal More's satiric intent.

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines "satire":

"A literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule, satirical writing or drama often scorns such folly by pretending to approve of values which are the diametric opposite of what the satirist actually wishes to promote."

The implied benefits of divorce, euthanasia, married priests, and women priests, expressed in Utopia, disagreed with More's celebrated dedication to devout Catholicism. More was a persecutor of heretics (Protestants) yet the book extolled the virtues of embracing varied religions, and even under the same roof. The piece engaged in political criticism, but More himself was Lord Chancellor, an influential English lawyer. Communism and the idea of communal living expressed as an ideal in Utopia could be seen as the opposite view expected from a rich landowner such as More.

Because Renaissance humanist movement, which glorified the ancient civilizations, had already established an influence during his time it seems possible More could have been tipping his hat to them by setting his work in Latin and telling of an ancient idyllic civilization built on "superior" ideals. If this was More's intent, and if the tale of a perfect communal society was a reference to New World legend (although in reality Amerigo Vespucci's Incas practiced cannibalism), then this would be further proof that More viewed Utopia to be seen as a satirical work.

In Arte of English Poesie George Puttenham argues the pastoral is a literary form especially designed "not of purpose to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication: but under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchance had not bene safe to have beene disclosed in any other sort." In The Making of a Poem, Strand and Boland note how the pastoral spoke to poets of the Renaissance period and their "deep European unease about power, urbanization, and the demands made for a new centralization", citing the pastoral as "one of the true intellectual engines of [Elizabethan] poetry".

First in Latin with the work of Petrarch, Pontano, and Mantuan, and then in Italian vernacular with the works of Boiardo, Italian poets led the way in a 14th Century revival of pastoral form. The pastoral became fashionable throughout Renaissance Europe. Because of the satire's popularity in England during Medieval and Early Renaissance times the pastoral's appearance there may have simply represented a new incarnation of the satire. In 1579 Virgil's Eclogues inspired Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar (a series of twelve eclogues, one for each calendar month) and ushered the pastoral form further into fashion, but Spenser's creation was more than just a collection of colloquialisms. A study by Robert Lane interprets The Shepheardes Calender as criticism of the Elizabethan hierarchy and how society exploited and neglected society's underprivileged. According to Lane, The Shepheardes Calender undermines the courtly role assigned to Elizabethan poetry and capitalized on such pop culture mainstays as woodcuts, proverbs, fables and the calendar format to further drive its point home.

Understanding the connection between the English Renaissance pastoral and the satirical literature which preceded it, it is easier to see how William Shakespeare used the pastoral form to explore the realms of political and social commentary. Shakespeare frequently exploited poetic form and theatrical convention to provide a vehicle for his legendary wit, so it may be safe to assume his use of the pastoral was also intended to "glaunce at greater matters". He made frequent use of the pastoral both through brief examples within plays and as the framework for complete works, riding on the shoulders of the public's love for satire, to transport the pastoral into the world of social and political commentary.

The main plot of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is derived, somewhat more loyally than Shakespeare is usually inclined, from Robert Greene's pastoral romance Pandosto (1590). Perhaps the most apparent pastoral element of the play is how pastoral life in Bohemia offers a sharp contrast to the world of the Sicilian court. Although the idealized character Perdita may be the primary spokesperson of the pastoral world and its values, Shakespeare does not romanticize the play's pastoral world itself. As a matter of fact the typical pastoral vision is undercut by sadness and ambivalence throughout the length of the play.

Historian Eric Ives has argued the play is actually a parody of Queen Anne Boleyn's fall, the wife of Henry VIII who was beheaded in 1536 for charges of adultery. Ives states numerous parallels exist between the two stories, including how Sir Henry Norreys, a close friend of Henry, was beheaded as a supposed lover of Anne, refusing to confess to save his life on the grounds that everyone knew of the Queen's innocence. Following this theory about the play, Perdita could represent Anne's only daughter, Queen Elizabeth I. An understanding of the play in this light further strengthens the connection Shakespeare made between the pastoral and satire.

His poem "When icicles hang by the wall" from the play Love's Labor's Lost may at first glance appear quaint. In this piece the country folk go about their daily work, subjected to the harsh and cold winter. They carry firewood into the hall, watch the sheep, milk the cows, all the while dealing with the bitter cold. But the owl represents more than a common bird; Shakespeare's owl represents the wealthy of society who watch over the poor, oblivious of the plight and singing a "merry note".

It is no stretch to assume Shakespeare's owl played an allegorical role in this pastoral. Shakespeare frequently used the owl for similar purposes. As Lady Macbeth prepares to murder the king she is startled by the shriek of an owl:

"Hark! - Peace!
It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman
Which gives the stern'st good-night." [Macbeth - II, 2]

Prior to the assassination of Julius Caesar an owl was reported:

"The bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place
Hooting and shrieking." [Julius Caesar - I, 3]

Further, Puck says of the owl:

"Now the wasted brands do glow,
Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud." [A Midsummer Night's Dream - V, 1]

Since Shakespeare often associated the owl with death, its use here may very likely represent the pending death of such rustics as cataloged within the poem. Also noteworthy is the owl's disregard for their situations throughout this poem, singing his merry song in spite of their toil. Given the possible satirical heritage of the Renaissance pastorals, the owl could easily represent the wealthy officials who go about their merry way oblivious of the common man's trials.

Understanding the connection between the English Renaissance pastoral and the satire, the interpretation of Shakespeare's As You Like It becomes less problematic. In the Arden Shakespeare edition, As You Like It is represented as a multi-layered chronicle of late English Renaissance culture and of all the various social and political conflicts marking the final decade of the sixteenth century. Dusinberre outlines how the play functions to "glaunce at greater matters". She cites Jaques's indebtedness to the period's vogue for satire and the faction-ridden politics occasioned by the Earl of Essex's career and his rivalry with Sir Robert Cecil. In the Arden Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare's pastoral play As You Like It, editor Juliet Dusinberre comments:

"Social and political realities would not have been far from the minds of its first audiences in 1599, whether at court or in the public theatre. Beneath an impeccably sunny surface 'As You Like It' touches on troubled territories."

The work of other Renaissance writers such as poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe may also be understood when a connection is made between the English Renaissance pastoral and its satirical heritage. Marlowe made the pastoral his own by introducing exaggerated imagery and sexuality to the form. Shepherds in the pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil had expressed love as a deep longing without sexuality, but in his pastoral poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" Marlowe's shepherd asks a woman to share an idealized romantic relationship. However, the shepherd's proposal is actually more ridiculous than idyllic, possibly indicating Marlowe's intent to satirize the traditional pastoral form. The shepherd offers his love:

"Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold . . ."

While a pretty promise, these and other claims in this poem are far from anything an actual shepherd could afford to bestow upon anyone. The poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard had previously utilized the country life as a refuge for rejected suitors, but Marlowe's shepherd is not concerned about rejection or whether his social or financial status is acceptable to the girl; his only concern is the desire for immediate pleasure:

"And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my Love."

Today's America lives in little or no fear for ridiculing the government or speaking out against "progress". But the pastoral provided those less fortunate a venue to play with questions "which verged on a philosophical subversion of traditional religious themes in poetry" (Strand and Boland, 208). The works of Renaissance writers like Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare provide compelling evidence pastoral literature of that period was often used as a vehicle for political and social commentary, and this intent becomes more clear when the satirical elements of these works' lineage are not overlooked; following in the shadows of the popularity of such well-loved writers as Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas More, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the pastoral would naturally have received a satirical interpretation by Renaissance readers and audiences. With this in mind, and although the references may likely be obscured with the passing of time, interpretation of the pastoral poem enters a new realm of understanding; instead of relegating these pieces to the world of kitsch and quaint, we may now be compelled to dig below the surface, blowing away the dust to uncover a treasure, and in doing so are likely to at least appreciate, if not enjoy, the wit of the pastoral form's most famous practitioners.

Works cited.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. New York: Penquin Classics, 2003.

Moore, R.. "As You Like It: Introduction." eNotes: As You Like It. Ed. Penny Satoris. Seattle: Enotes.com Inc, October 2002. eNotes.com. 24 June 2009. <http://www.enotes.com/as-you-like-it/introduction>.

More, Thomas. Utopia. New York: Penquin Classics, 2003.

"Pastoral in Shakespeare's Works: Introduction." Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 89. Gale Cengage, 2005. eNotes.com. 2006. 24 Jan, 2009.

Shakespeare, William. The Arden Shakespeare As You Like It. Edited by Juliet Dusinberre. London: Thomson Learning, 2006.

Shepheards Devises: Edmund Spenser's 'Shepheardes Calendar' and the Institutions of Elizabethan Society. Renaissance Society of America, 1995. The Free Library. 2006. 24 Jan, 2009 .

Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Poem. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love: Introduction. Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 0. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 31 January 2009.

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (Style). Notes on Poetry. Answers Corporation, 2006. Answers.com 01 Feb. 2009.

"The Winter's Tale: Pastoral Elements." Shakespeare for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 30 June 2009. <http://www.enotes.com/winters-tale/pastoral-elements>.

"Interview With The Vampire" and Evolution in the Horror Film Genre

2009-06-25T01:12:00.000-07:00

The rules and expectations within film genres are like a language with evolving rules of grammar; its evolution is a give and take between filmmaker and audience, guided by cultural changes as well as technological advances. For a film genre to survive it must communicate, remain relevant, and in the process of creation and viewing it must engage both filmmaker and audience. A successful film genre must constantly reinvent itself and change with the times.

The vampire film genre has held audiences in its spell almost since the beginning of film history. The 1922 German film "Nosferatu," directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau featured a supernatural vampire, an unlicensed version of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (whose estate sued and won), and the Dracula character appeared again in Universal's "Dracula" of 1931 (featuring Bela Lugosi). However, the vampires in both films are quite different. "Nosferatu" presented the hideous creature of European folklore, while Lugosi's vampire was a more alluring character with a sexual appeal. These differing representations of vampires subsequently reappeared throughout the genre's history, presenting many interpretations of the character from mindless zombie to captivating siren.

Changing with the times, vampire films have somewhat left the larger classification of the horror film genre. For the most part, horror films have retained their focus on the victim. Whatever monster might be present is an evil to be avoided and its exploits are the thing to be feared. But in the vampire film genre our monsters have become beings with feelings, sometimes we are sympathetic of their blood-sucking fates and often the vampire has actually become the protagonist in these films. We may feel a passing regret for Freddy Krueger's ("Nightmare on Elm Street") fate, yet he remains the monster. Jason may briefly tug our sympathy strings in "Friday the 13th" but again, he is an evil to be overcome. On the other hand, in Anne Rice's "Interview With the Vampire," the vampire Louis is sensitive and thoughtful.

Louis says, “It was only when I became a vampire that I respected for the first time all of life. I never saw a living, pulsing human being until I was a vampire. I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over my lips, my hands!” He is a Byronic hero who has transcended the demonic vampire of Hollywood and revisited the Romantic movement and 19th century Gothic fiction. Flawed yet enchanting, Louis has the brooding sexuality of Heathcliff from Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" (1847) and the rough-edged charisma of Rochester from Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" (1847). He is Erik, the Phantom from Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera" and Claude Frollo from Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Louis' partner and counterpart Lestat de Lioncourt embodies the Byronic spirit as well.

Like the vampire novel, vampire films have become character driven, growing from pulp fiction into literature. These films have created a film language of their own, moving from a fascination with blood and death to an exploration of the soul and life.

Howard Hawks and Auteur Theory in Film Criticism

2009-06-24T01:31:00.000-07:00

Auteur theory is often associated with the French film review periodical "Cahiers du cinéma" and has carried a major impact on film criticism since it was advocated by film director and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. Simplified, Auteur theory explores a director's influences on a film, considering the director one of the film's authors. Of course, in European Union law the film director is always considered an author of the film but this doesn't usually hold true in Hollywood.

Since auteur theory was never summarized in a collective statement, its use could be broadly interpreted. Truffaut and those who wrote for Cahiers expected directors to wield the camera like a writer's pen (Alexandre Astruc's notion of the caméra-stylo or "camera-pen"), superimposing the director's vision on the film through the mise en scène, therefore diminishing the screenwriter's role. Filmmakers such as Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renior were considered prime examples of "auteurs" of their films.

The director's contribution did not need to be consciously made and according to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "the defining characteristics of an author's work are not necessarily those which are most readily apparent. The purpose of criticism thus becomes to uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and treatment a hard core of basic and often recondite motifs. The pattern formed by these motifs . . . is what gives an author's work its particular structure, both defining it internally and distinguishing one body of work from another." Because of its scope, depth, and the length of his tenure in Hollywood the work of director Howard Hawks is seen as a test case for auteur theory.

One defining characteristic of Hawks' work is the use of an exclusive, self-sufficient, all-male group who is often isolated physically or emotionally from society. Men are accepted into this elite group only after a period of testing where they must prove how "good" they are at whatever job the group is responsible for. Women are generally seen as a threatening force and are only admitted to the group after a long ritual courtship, and even then are never really considered full members. An undercurrent of homosexuality never fully surfaces, but does occasionally run close to the surface. Often men in the group have either been married or committed to women, but suffered some unnamed trauma at their hands. Men in the group are usually considered equals, but women are clearly associated with animals (most explicitly in "Bringing Up Baby," "Gentlemen Prefer Blonds," and "Hatari!"); the men in the group must strive to maintain mastery.

Because of the collaborative aspect of making a film, auteur theory began receiving criticism in the 1960s. The New Criticism school of literary criticism called auteur theory's speculations about what the author meant, based on the author's personality and life experiences, an intentional fallacy. New Critics believed the author's intention was secondary to the experience of reading or viewing literature.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and a Life in the Shadows

2009-06-23T00:26:00.000-07:00

In "The Art of Fiction," John Gardner talks about the "fictional dream," the movie running in our minds as we read the words of a story. This can be a precarious process and many of its elements depend on the ability and attitude of the reader. The reader must be carefully guided by a narrator, often a character within the story or a reliable witness to the action.

Film allows its audience to take a more passive role in understanding the story. Cinematic narration relays its story through visual cues which may compact a greater amount of information in a shorter time. While written and cinematic narration both convey description and viewpoint, the old saying holds true and "a picture is worth a thousand words."

The 1942 short story “It Had to Be Murder" by Cornell Woolrich, the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rear Window," echoes the sense of doom and personal impotence found in much of Woolrich’s fiction. Because of his homosexuality, Woolrich must have understood the dichotomy of walking between the shadows and the light. Francis Nevins called Woolrich “the Poe of the 20th century and the poet of its shadows, the Hitchcock of the written word” (Francis M. Nevins. “Tonight, Somewhere in New York”. Carroll & Graf, New York, 2005. p. 1). In this story, his hero suffers from a broken leg and is relegated to the status of "peeping Tom." As an invalid he must depend upon the actions of others to impact his surroundings, and if he is not believed or at least taken seriously he cannot effect change. When his suspicious neighbor confronts him in his own apartment, the hero is unable to defend himself and must be rescued.

Woolrich's fiction seems to echo or parallel his own life experience. This fragment was found in Woolrich’s papers after his death in 1968:

“I was only trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me one day and obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a brief while longer, after I was already gone. To stay in the light, to be with the living, a little while past my time.” (”Blues of a Lifetime. The Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich.” ed. Mark T. Bassett. Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Bowling Green, 1991. p. 152).

"Rear Window" is considered by many to be one of director Alfred Hitchcock's best and most thrilling films. We see how the hero (photographer L. B. "Jeff" Jeffries, played by James Stewart) not only is separated from his neighbors by a courtyard, window blinds, and a broken leg, but also how he must depend on binoculars to bring the world in closer and other people to interact with it. We can see his sympathy for Ms. Lonely Hearts and understand how he must relate to her lonely plight, and wonder why he avoids the topic of marriage with his beautiful girlfriend (Lisa Fremont, played by Grace Kelly). Even Jeffries' profession reminds us of someone attempting to connect with reality through a camera lens. Ultimately, we understand how we all can be limited in some way and relate to a feeling of personal ineffectiveness.

Critic Bosley Crowther of The New York Times remarked:

Mr. Hitchcock's film is not "significant." What it has to say about people and human nature is superficial and glib. But it does expose many facets of the loneliness of city life and it tacitly demonstrates the impulse of morbid curiosity. The purpose of it is sensation, and that it generally provides in the colorfulness of its detail and in the flood of menace toward the end.

Perhaps Hollywood felt content with merely producing another thriller and wasn't quite ready to explore the original story's particular brand of shadows. The film received four Academy Award nominations: Best Director for Alfred Hitchcock, Best Screenplay for John Michael Hayes, Best Cinematography, Color for Robert Burks, Best Sound Recording for Loren L. Ryder, Paramount Pictures. John Michael Hayes won a 1955 Edgar Award for best motion picture.

Film Truth and Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera"

2009-06-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

Primarily in the 1920's, filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov experimented with a theory called kino pravda, or "film truth." Perhaps even more of a montage than what was produced by Pudovkin and discussed by Eisenstein, kino pravda set out to capture fragments of reality and combine them to reveal a deeper truth, one not readily visible to the naked eye. This truth would be one accessible only through the eye of the camera.

Vertov called fiction film a new "opiate for the masses" and belonged to a movement known as kiniks (or kinokis) who hoped to abolish non-documentary film-making. His "Man With a Movie Camera" was Vertov's response to critics who rejected his earlier "One-Sixth Part of the World." Because of its experimental nature, Vertov worried this later film would be ignored or destroyed, hence the film's opening statement:

"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature."

Despite Vertov's claims that filming could capture reality without intruding, cameras of the day were large, loud, and could not be hidden easily. To be truly hidden, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman attempted to distract their subjects with something else, something louder than the camera. So even if the camera itself was not imposing itself on the scene, the necessary distraction would alter the "truth" to some extent. Therefore, "film truth" could not technically be a reality during Vertov's time as a filmmaker.

Much like Vertov's earlier "Kino-Pravda" series, 23 short documentaries created over a period of three years, "Man With a Movie Camera" contains a propagandist element. Vertov wished to create a futuristic city following the Marxist ideal, an industrialized city built on the back of workers and their hard labor. Much of the film's style seems to borrow from the earlier "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" by Walter Ruttman. However, these stylistic choices do seem to create a symbolic language which is generally effective.

While "Man With a Movie Camera" may not fully realize the goal it sought to portray, a "truth in film," it may have inadvertently produced a true statement of the era which produced it. The film contains an optimism, idealism and naivety representative of its place in history.

Eisenstein and the Dialectic Theory of Film

2009-06-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

At its core, a dialectic is simply a conflict. But Soviet filmmakers, especially Sergei Eisenstein, elevated these conflicts to an art form and their dialectic theory of film has made a substantial impact on cinematic visual aesthetics. Eisenstein used a juxtaposition of conflicting images to create a montage, believing the effect could bring about consequential social change. Unfortunately, films built on this technique, such as his Battleship Potemkin (1925), now come across gimmicky and in some cases laughable.

However, the dialectic theory of film has not left us. The dialectic has been proven itself an effective way to condense an argument and persuade the audience, sometimes in less than 30 seconds. You can readily find any number of examples by flipping through a few television channels, watching a few commercials. The conflict may be presented through colliding words, colliding images, or both.

MAN: So are you trying to watch your weight?

WOMAN: No, why?

MAN: Nothing, it’s just the Cheerios box. It says it’s low in fat.

WOMAN: Does it look like I need to watch my weight?

MAN: No, no, no, no. It’s just the box. It says there are only 110 calories per serving.

WOMAN: There are other reasons why I like it.

MAN: I know. It’s just the box. It says it’s made from five whole grains. That’s good, right?

WOMAN: What else does the box say?

MAN: The box says, “Shut up, Steve.”

But herein lies the at least part of the reason this technique has fallen out of favor in film today. Dialectics are by their very nature manipulative and unnatural. It is difficult to witness use of this technique without feeling on some level you are being "sold" something.

In the famous "Odessa Steps" sequence of Battleship Potemkin we are exposed to a montage of images calculated to bring about an emotional response. In one part of the sequence, a woman with a baby carriage is shot and not only does her death leave the child unattended, but even the fall of her body pushes the carriage down a flight of stairs. She clutches her large belt buckle, a swan (probably a symbol of culture, civilization, beauty), as blood pours slowly over it. Even if the mythological associations of the swan had passed viewers' attentions, the woman's fine clothing would have made them realize she was another middle-class victim of the Cossack assault. Eisenstein knew his audience would associate the Cossacks with their reputation for horsemanship and ruthless military skills, and knowing that, he capitalized on it.

When an art form is new, its boundaries remain to be defined. The fact Eisenstein believed the addition of sound to film was a passing gimmick seems to show he believed film's boundaries were similar to that of visual art. It would be easy to say Eisenstein lacked an understanding of film art, but how can anyone understand what has not yet been defined? It might also be tempting to say he lacked a vision of what the form could become, but judging from his experimentation and passion for film as a dialectic tool, it might be more accurate to say his vision was merely of something different than what film eventually did become.

Regardless, the modern television commercial owes him a great debt.