Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I promised some extracts from Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, so before I start on today’s storifying I’ll cut and paste them here.

First, that any of this might apply to us lowly, non-rhyming storytellers:

§50 The distinction between poets and prose-writers is a vulgar error.

The bit where he implies poets are bigger than Christ:

§40 The fame of legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the restricted sense: but it can scarcely be a question whether if we deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them in their higher character of poets any excess will remain.

His argument against realism and for romance:

§62 Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stript of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of Poetry and forever developes new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. §63 Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it. §64 A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

On the transparency of ulterior motives, and their deleterious effect upon the work:

¶18
§121 But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. §122 Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great master-pieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood: or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness with which the author in common with his auditors are infected. […] §124 To such purposes Poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. §125 And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion: which divested of imagination are other names for caprice and appetite. […] §129 Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new food; which it devours in secret.

On the inspiration of the muse, and the unfortunate necessity of filling in the gaps she leaves behind:

§283 Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. §284 A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” §285 The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and grace, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. §286 I appeal to the greatest Poets of the present day, whether it be not an error to assert that the greatest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. §287 The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions; a necessity only imposed by a limitedness of the poetical faculty itself. §288 For Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions. §289 We have his own authority also for the Muse having “dictated” to him “the unpremeditated song.” [Milton, Paradise Lost] §290 And let this be an answer to those who would alledge the fifty six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso. §291 Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. §292 This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the plastic and pictorial arts: a great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb, and the very mind which directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.

Reiterating the nature of the muse:

§319 Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic that it is not subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth and recurrence has no necessary connexion with consciousness or will.

Note that I didn’t say any of the above; Shelley said it. These extracts from the Big Name Poet are merely intended to show that neither what I have said about the muse, nor what I haven’t said but has nevertheless been attributed to me, is new. These are things people have been saying about writing ever since Plato, and saying Shelley was full of himself is no argument against his experience of the muse.

I, for one, would be better off with an ego like Shelley’s; I’d certainly write more if I believed more in my writing. On the other hand I’d probably edit less, so, tempting as it is, I won’t go on that ego trip some seem to think I’m already on. I’ll just lay out some chocolate to tempt the muse and get back to writing.

The title is an old feedback-request from Christine, which could apply to almost anything I’ve written. I agreed with her, of course: I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to make people care about characters and worlds is filler, filler, filler. My fingers hurt just thinking about it. Brevity is the soul of my muse, unfortunately, which means the filler gets left to yours truly.

On the Lori trail again, I renewed my passport recently. I had to bring it into work to prove I was legal (to work, not to drink), and only then did I notice it had expired. (For those of you keeping track, yes I have been working for this company for six months already. Don’t tell the feds.) It was a questionable matter, as I assembled bits of the passport application to mail in, whether I would end up wearing the same clothes in my new picture as in the old one. I’m pretty sure I pulled that off with a license once, but not this time with the passport. I’ll give it another shot in 2012.

I didn’t know that my thrift-shop fashion sense, my mind-like-a-steel-sieve time sense and my Nazarite hairstyle were I-N things. There goes another bit of me, pegged, labelled and catalogued. What was that quote about psychology robbing us of of our individuality? Please Misunderstand Me…

Back to blogness: a few entries back (Kept Muse) I said something vague about the cohesion between Beginning and End. I’ve come up with an even fuzzier term for it: storiness. The essential storiness of a story isn’t much easier to pin down now that I have this highly technical term for it. Of course, in all matters my first thought is plot, but other things can hold a story together: theme, mood and style can all establish storiness in the shortest of stories. Longer stories need some plot, too, but plot is not enough to distinguish a story from a loose collection of notes. There has to be…more of everything.

The muse slept in this morning, after I’d planned some writing time for her. She did, however, flood me with ideas in the shower - she seems to like times and places where there are no pencils or keyboards around, probably because it means no immediate work for her. Lazy muse. I cornered her on the T, though, and made her add her new ideas to the opening scene of The Wrong Novel. She’s pulling in some stuff from The Wrong Prequel, both to set up later events and to justify the opening blood and gore. Maybe sleep is the secret to getting more out of her.

Lori, source of all blog content, blogged about curse words. I’m also a known fan of the English language, so I have to point out that curse and swear and cuss and execrate all mean pretty much the same thing, and do not refer, technically, to foul (a.k.a. vulgar) language or dirty words.

These two families of words split up cleanly: in the foul court, we have fine old words like the f word, which are undeserving of their current dishonor, as well as obviously dirty words like the sheeeee-it word, body parts like ass (which picks up subtones from its donkey sense), and other riff-raff like Micro$oft.

The world of true cursing, however, involves blasphemy, oaths, or wishes for damnation. Here we find damn, its brother darn and its cousins hell and heck, all invocations of deity from jeez to Kahless, and some mysterious old words like bloody (which is, to my knowledge, a particularly Christian oath abbreviated from God’s blood).

Darning them all to heck, in other words, is not vulgar but evil, yet it’s hard to curse when you don’t believe in cursing or the second commandment. So curse words degenerate into just so many more dirty words, but deep down you know bloody isn’t saying much to the listener - hence the preference for dirty dirty words rather than dusty swear words.

Following more Lori links, I found a good word in the pseudodictionary: truline, for that opening line that truly says it all. I wonder if I’ve coined any non-Romulan words I can submit.

Final scenes don’t multiply on me the way they seem to for Lori. My trouble is proliferation of opening scenes. I wrote another opener for The Wrong Novel yesterday, which brings me up to six or seven now.

The trouble with openings is that you usually can’t start at the chronological beginning - life and plot come on slowly, but a story has to dive right in there and catch the reader, plus state the full premise in the opening line. (Never read how-to-write books - that’s where you pick up crazy ideas like “the first line must summarize the entire story.”) So I wrote an opening where things really begin, that’s very interesting for me but much too boring for the reader, and I wrote an bloody beginning to grab the reader by the throat and shout “Read me!” In between there was a bit of negotiation, where I kept trying to move the opening closer to the chronological beginning - but I know I have to start in the middle with the blood and the guts (and, surprisingly, the tea service), then work backwards and forwards at the same time. Flashbacks are a pain in the neck, even when you have five spare openings’ worth of material to use for them.

Speaking of openings, I really have been working on the Seven Saga. The first chapter (barring two spare beginnings) is kind of done. I got everything I wanted in there, spackled every plothole of Seven’s misspent youth, and added some Obscure Characters to boot. The only problem with my story is that it isn’t quite a story. It’s missing that essential cohesion that binds Beginning to End, if you know what I mean. The muse has been sleeping on the job, again. I wish she got busy when I’m too busy to pay her any mind, but the truth is she’s a lazy muse who insists on bubble baths and chocolate and three-hour background checks to coin one Romulan word and hours at the keyboard to contemplate her previous drafts, before she’ll write a word.

On the other fanfic front, the Buffy finale was good, at least in its Spike aspect. I can’t say I saw too much Willow continuity in Evil Willow, or felt that the two hours cohered any better than chapter one of the Seven Saga, but I’m into the whole soulless Spike issue so I found this little reverse redemption compensated (in my fic-weaving mind) for the Random Spike Characterization of the second half of the season. I was handling it a little differently in my still incomplete chip fic, but now I see the potential of reconnecting it to canon at the end that I couldn’t see before.

Still, I’m not sure I want to rejoin canon. If I could think of a way to marry off Spuffy, I’d do that instead, but Buffy, if not Spike, is too twenty-first century for a secret wedding. This is not a century for great love stories - which is, I suppose, a good deal of the reason I take refuge in the future.

I envy Lori her new day off. Underemployment was the best thing that ever happened to my fic. I knew it was really bad when I started taking notes for The Wrong Novel and The Wrong Prequel during a meeting this morning - but when that elusive political situation finally resolves itself (more or less) in your mind, you have to write it down. It’s not like the muse is going to do this for me, wretched little filker that she is. (The muse is currently investigating the filking potential of hip-hop. Be afraid. Be kind of afraid.)

Now I’m going to bed, because the muse needs sleep. (It’s not really 10 p.m. - Moveable Type doesn’t seem to understand Daylight Savings Time.) The many bloggy things I’m behind on - Big Name Poet Shelley and his controversial views on the muse, importing my other blog to MT, wondering why Lori’s blog is the only one that I find things to say about these days, etc. - will have to wait another day, and then some.

Send in the Clones…

Lori links Salon’s review of Attack of the Clones, saying someone’s getting too deep about a shallow movie. I don’t know when demands for more on-screen rolls in the hay became intellectual - probably back when virginity became an unnatural affliction with which teens are “stricken” rather than born. Such revealing counterfactual preconceptions are scattered throughout the article. Anakin wasn’t “grim”, he was whiny. Padme wasn’t grim either; she played it cool until she decided she was going to die anyway and she might as well kiss the boy.

The reviewer gives away his ignorance when he talks about millions of cloned Boba Fetts being “gloated over” by the producer. They weren’t exactly the Ewoks, Mr. Thomson. He claims it’s never explained why the happy couple can’t just go roll in the hay, when it was actually made quite clear that Jedi don’t do the wild thing.

But what I find disturbing about this review is that it would fit any story in which two people fall in love on screen and manage to get married in the final scene, all without taking parts A and B out for a test drive. This is a criticism that could be made of Episode 2, or of Jane Austen for that matter, sight-unseen - which is to say, it’s not criticism at all. It is a statement of faith that it’s impossible to tell a love story; it is pure disbelief in romance.

Lori distracted me from what I was planning to say, so I have to back up a bit now, to Sunday night. I never meant to be trendy enough to see Episode 2 on it’s big premiere weekend. Dr. Deb and I had decided to watch the X-Files finale for old times’ sake. We used to watch XF when it was all about the fat-sucking vampires, sewer-dwelling fluke-men and UST. We went on strike when Mulder disappeared; in our minds it’s still the cult-classic of third season, when the occasional mytharc episode could be ignored as just so much inane prattle about smallpox and bees.

Imagine our disappointment when the finale turned out to be all mytharc, all the time, in a little locked room. Dr. Deb didn’t know about the Suddenly and Dramatically Resolved Sexual Tension, and I didn’t know Scully had given up Mulder’s spooky love-child - for adoption, I presume. That was the least of my problems with the new Puffy Scully. Who was that weepy woman, and what has she done with my calm and rational scientist-in-flats?

As for the episode itself, it was dreck on the level of the worst maudlin angstfic. Skinner and the prosecution posturing at each other with Scully telling-not-showing on the witness stand hardly makes for a plot, never mind a two-hour finale. So forty minutes into our abject horror and suffering, I suggested to Dr. Deb that we blow the joint and go catch Attack of the Clones instead. We made the 9:30 show, which was as man-heavy as a physics conference. “At least there are no children,” I said, little suspecting how the excess of males would contribute to later events.

After the tragedy of the mytharc, we were in the mood to be pleased. Dr. Deb made nominal protests against Jar-Jar, but when he brought an end to a thousand years of peace in the Republic, we were sufficiently avenged upon the animated pest. Jar-Jar didn’t start the trouble; Anakin Skywhiner, heir and forebear of Luke Skywhiner, did it when he confessed his undying (and extremely painful) love for Padme Clotheshorse. This was too much for the heavily-macho audience; they laughed. (Don’t tell George, eh?) I’ve seen audiences laugh at the wrong bits of movies before, but never with quite so much justification. Giggling continued on and off until the combined fashion show/love affair was interrupted by the Shmi incident and subsequent “rescue” of Obi Wan.

Let me pause to Be Like Liz here, and praise Obi Wan. He’s such the dashing hero - noble, intelligent, and forceful (sorry). I loved all his scenes, especially the ones bluffing his way through the clone factory. The poor dude was saddled with his Young Padwhine Anakin by his dying Jedi master in a massive guilt trip last movie, but does he bitch and moan about it all through this one? No. Does he complain that having a clueless idiot for an apprentice is holding him back? No. Obi Wan is a real Jedi.

Despite the audience’s impromptu laugh track, I enjoyed the follies of the One Fated to Restore Petulance to the Force. Just watching him bumble his way through the movie brought up rare questions of good and evil. When he stares at Padme that way, is he just moon-eyeing her, or is he manipulating her? Does he stop and think before his little starter-kit genocide, or was he only beserking when he killed not just the things, but their wo-things and child-things? And when he blames Obi-Wan afterwards, does he really mean it? (I think he does.)

Is the soul of evil, then, blaming others for what is your own or no one’s fault? Or is it wanting to force people to be good, or wanting the power to do so? Is it wanting to be a Jedi and get the girl, too? (Padme deserves some share of the blame for getting involved with Jedi-boy, but who can help kissing the boy when your timeline is about to dead-end gladiator-style?)

Yes, I’m reading all this into the movie because I know Jedi-boy is scheduled to do an interstellar Evil Willow in the next ep, but if I’d lived under a rock for the past few decades and walked into the movie blind, I would still have loved it. You see, I’m constitutionally unable to resist a secret wedding - I’ve written at least six of them, and I have a bad habit of keeping the wedding secret from the bride and groom themselves. It’s more than just the wedding, though; the whole self-destructive, “we’ll be living a lie and it will destroy us,” star-crossed romance is just lovely in a live-fast, rule-Naboo-young kind of way. It doesn’t matter that Lucas wrote it badly enough that the audience laughed, because he still wrote it and it’s still floating around in my head teasing the muse with ideas of love as suicide, love as greed, love as irresistible as the dark side, and the fundamental tragedy of the good.

Which brings us to the last deep theme of this laughable piece of fluff: that the Evil Overlords have a plan that’s coming together, while the Jedi Knights are falling apart. They are blind to the Sith they’ve elected provisional Emperor, blind to the clone plant cranking out Boba Fetts for the past ten years, blind to the fact that “balance” is the last thing they should want restored to the Force after a thousand years of peace, blind to their pretty-boy messiah practicing genocide and marrying a Senator, blind to the truth of the war, which is both sides against the Jedi - blind and self-defeating.

There’s nothing in the world like a good old-fashioned tragedy, unless it’s good old-fashioned badly-written science fiction into the gaps of which you unconsciously read the story you would have written, if you had millions to blow on your own personal space opera. Fanfiction, by the by, is the act of writing the shadow-story down.

Apparently there’s a company out there that does these quiz things now, with some nasty weighting stuff and a full list of results to help you cheat. (The following commercial link has been corrected for spelling and style.)

Which Buffy villain are you? (by calophi)

I think we need a “Which Fandom are You?” quiz, or maybe a “Which Hated and Despised Pairing are You?”

“Are you Dorothy Parker?” a guest at a party inquired.
“Yes, do you mind?”

You are Dorothy Parker
You are cynical, bitter, and bitchy! Too bad you are so preoccupied with love and unhappy with life. It’s okay, your wit has made you very popular. By the way, aren’t all men pigs?

Take the Which Poet are You? Quiz
Brought to you out of boredom and pretention!

Dorothy Parker in a book review:
“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown aside with great force.”

Another book review:
“He is beyond question a writer of power; and his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing.”

Quotes and image stolen from: http://users.rcn.com/lyndanyc/dorothy.html.

I’m heading off to CraftBoston - I’ll be the one whom crowds are following like sheep - but first a few words on my recent Quest for Trek:

I tried to watch Insurrection last night, but the basketball game ran over and Channel 7 cancelled it. Channel 38 has likewise cancelled all Voyager reruns. There is no Trek in Boston, unless you’re of the opinion that Enterprise is Trek. I am not.

At least there’s fiction, right? In a moment of moral weakness, I got a pay-per-fic Trek book out of the library (one of the new Khan ones, if you must know) because it sounded marginally interesting. I slogged through a few pages, but the prose was too wooden to bear straight after a Walter Jon Williams book. You could see it as Shatner’s acting immortalized in print, or you could just walk away.

I wish I didn’t have to keep walking away.

There’s always fanfic, great, immortal, BNF fanfic, right? I could go fishing in the Trekiverse archives for winners of years past. (After just twenty months, my first three stories posted to ASC have been archived: Assimilation, One Line, Two Dimples and the filk Chakotay. It’s a sign that I’m almost two years old.) But to tell the truth (somebody’s got to), I still haven’t finished Talking Stick/Circle. And honestly, now, how many people do you know who’ve actually read Talking Stick/Circle? Sure, pick any fan off the street and she’ll have heard of Talking Stick/Circle; she’ll confess that she ought to read it one of these days. Lori, in order to do her zendom review of TS/C, had to go read the thing herself, more power to her. The point being, that a Big Name is just a name and is no guarantee that anyone’s reading your fic anymore a week after it was posted, never mind once it’s faded into legend.

In response to Lori’s blog on BNF’s

Trekdom is the oldest show fandom, dating back to the successful drive to keep the show on the air for a third season, and the unsuccessful one for a fourth. I don’t know that it’s IDIC that keeps Trek fans more polite than the newer, more rabid fandoms. I’d guess it was science fiction itself. In my experience, S’s have little patience for sci-fi of any sort, not even with Seven of Nine parading around in a catsuit, so the Trek population is heavily slanted towards the N’s, which cuts down on personality conflicts. Sometimes BNF is a matter of personality, too.

It’s dangerous, with non-Trekkers lurking nearby, to talk of BNF’s-by-merit. Let us say that all BNF’s deserve their big names, but that it is not always for fic that they’ve gotten them. Consider the idea that Big Fame can result merely from participation in fandom as a social activity, rather than from the stories themselves. It is, for people like myself, a very strange concept, but one which I’ve heard more than once and must take into account. I think Lori touches on this phenomenon when she talks of BNF’s by PR, of the effect of Big Names in author’s notes, and of Big Fans acting important and authorative, but she seems to believe it still has something to do with advertising your fic. I disagree - it’s not the fic that spreads by these means, but the Big Name itself.

Of course, all BNF’s write, or have at some point written, fanfic. It’s a rite of passage, but it’s not necessarily the source of their fame. Like a presidential candidate who was, technically, in the armed forces for the last relevant war but spent his tour of duty behind a desk somewhere or reporting for a military newspaper, the BNF’s actual fic may be merely nominal. Or she may still be cranking out the fic, but in a forum which will never be critical thereof. (One cannot overestimate the importance of quantity in fandom.) Thus, someone who has produced quality stories at a steady rate for years can be thrown over by voracious fans for a newbie with the energy to flood the market with average fic. To see a BNF-by-fic lose, say, a fanfic contest to a BNF-by-potlatch can be a disheartening thing to those who still think fandom ought to be all about the fic.

Archivists, blogs and rec sites aren’t common in Trekdom, so the idea that fame can derive from something that isn’t even there comes hard to geeky old-school fans who grew up on TOS, such as yours truly. One sees more of fame by social factors in the pairing lists, but I think that in order to find persona trumping oeuvre on a large scale, you’d have to look to other fandoms. If you’d rather not see that sort of thing, it’s best to stick to Trek. There are far stranger things in out there in fandom than our little sock puppets.