“But it’s free delivery,” says the Fox. “And at competitive prices!”

I’m into her for 100Kc already. It’s all terribly fun. I have pencils coming out the yin-yang here … and all I use are pens!

What’s that definition of a good salesman? Able to sell sand to an Arab. Asia sells pencils to a computer-ite.

It’s bitterly cold today, but my attitude is like a ripened Florida orange. The heat will have to come from the fireplace and, perhaps, a hot jacuzzi bath (with the new scented bubblebath — citrus & spice).

So Plan B is now in progress: eat more to put on that layer of suet to insulate the body.

Peanuts and cheese are a favorite. Red wine and dark chocolate go well together. Birdbath-size bowls of lentil soup help, too.

My refrain to my thin, gorgeous wife has been, “Why can’t we just get fat?” (she has no fear of that; O to be a thirty-yr-old and burn calories like a hamster on a treadmill!)

july 18, 2011

“There are few jobs in which years’ worth of labour can be viewed in a quick scan of four walls and even fewer opportunities granted to us to gather all our intelligence and sensitivity in a single place. Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.”

– Alain de Botton, “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” (“painting”)

My biggest problem with “Ides” is its speedy plot that jumps over who these people are, and so loses its chance to take the mind of the viewer into what these people want and why they are doing what they’re doing to get it. The simplest character is Clooney’s governor/pres candidate; we don’t know this guy beyond his cardboard cutout of pretty much every/any Democrat out there in the poly-sphere. Next most transparent is Philip Seymore-Hoffman. His characterization of a campaign director gets one dramatic scene that pays off, but this comes too late and is, unfortunately, a mere stepping stone for the lead character’s move toward pulling his values inside out to get what he wants. Ryan Gosling’s strong-willed, though oddly naive, character is the centerpiece of this political thriller. Of course this character shows himself, but he’s more a cartoon, a wish-upon-a-star for political enthusiasts to hang some semblance of honor on their favorite poly-operatives type (not to say anything about the candidates themselves). His preening self-delusion about the political gamesmanship his chosen profession dishes up, and the politicians’ do-anything-to-win attitude and can’t-do-wrong personalities, is enough to choke on by the final credits. Basically, at the end of the film, and to sum up, it’s a cliché that’s older than Willie Stark.

On the other hand, “The Help” immediately draws you into its story by letting its characters speak and act in ways that are as far from cliché as the Earth and Moon. Why? Because they show their world in words and actions we can look into, see working themselves through, and so we’re able to draw inferences quickly and summations sooner than later. Never mind that this world is 1963, and is Mississippi, and takes us into the middle-class homes of bigots and shanty homes of black maids. What we, the audience, see is the recidivism of downtrod lives against society and gov’t that not only doesn’t care, but has manufactured itself to function just so. But both of these has a human face, that speaks and acts and reacts. The three rules of Aristotelian drama.

Winner: character

An Empty House: cliché

I need an assistant.

Perhaps I can find a English-speaking Czech who wants to intern as a publishing publicist. Then I can have help researching proper review mags & newspapers & on-line sites to send WHAT BEAUTY. That’s a start. And then there are the calls I need to make to the USA to drum up radio interviews, feature stories in art mags and NY papers (a good novel about art & NYC has to gain some ground; or perhaps tie in with another story).

See, this is the kind of stuff I think up, but need arms and legs and fingers and brain to make happen.

Meanwhile, the new novel is getting started in my head.

Oh, and Asia is doing just fine; bopping around the now-frozen Prague on her power walks. Life is grand.

Here’s my take on the uses of dialogue:

While dialogue is important to establish character and, yes, to move story forward, by putting dialogue in front of narrative, as a rule, does two harms. Firstly, dialogue that is used in place of narrative usually rings false because the “information” (i.e., setting, description, and story narrative) we otherwise get in the narrative is often already known or should be known by the characters. Or, the narrative is important history of these characters (or place or the characters themselves) and cannot be fudged into dialogue. Or else such dialogue leaves the reader curious about “what” is happening and “why” it has happened.

An example of a bad dialogue story (80%+ dialogue-to-narrative ratio) can be found in Ethan Hawke’s “The Hottest State” — where we get the story (what little there is) from characters who merely walk around (and talk) or sit somewhere (and talk). The effect of this type of story is that seldom does the reader understand where the hell this scene is taking place, or when (night or day?), or how (where did these people come from; how did they get there; what the hell is happening outside their immediate environment?). In other words, the story lacks the narrative “thread” that holds together character with “the story behind, or of, the character.”

It ceases to be “narrative fiction” and is otherwise a theater playscript or film script. The difference is in technique of storytelling, naturally, but lacking story narrative hurts both the characters (they come off wordy and long-winded) and the overall story. At least when you read a play or film script, you get prompts of setting, position, time of day, etc. But plays and scripts are meant to be performed, not read. This is the difference I speak of.

Of course, you can find fiction in which dialogue is made the centerpiece. Philip Roth’s “Deception” is a perfect example (as is Julian Barnes’ “Talking it Over”). There is, by just a cursory look, nearly 90% dialogue. This is intentional, whereby Roth wants to draw you into the purely verbal world of these characters. Setting is implied (or given as dialogue that develops the scene; but never as a simple marker — “Oh, isn’t this hide-away lovers’ hotel perfect!” Blech!).

The reader is immediately drawn in because, despite the lack of narrative (for place, time-span, scene development) the dialogue is both compelling and illustrative of the situation. We don’t need narrative here because these scenes are, at once, intimate and secret, and made to be independent of each other. The story works because we know this going in (or at least within the first five pages; after which we don’t miss narrative, don’t need it, and can find that it gets in the way of these characters who successfully volley their repartee as stage characters are demanded to hold).

Hawke doesn’t assume this same intent. And by not assuming it directly, immediately, he shows his inexperience as a writer and his poor understanding of what makes story work; he’s an actor who has worked with dialogue as a career demand, and now has tried to write a narrative story relying on dialogue to carry its weight. The story fails (partly) through this technique (but otherwise fails because Hawke just isn’t a very good writer with narrative or dialogue). Genre fiction writers often rely on such dialogue-driven techniques, which is my hunch why the writer answering the LinkedIN thread made such a comment; genre fiction that sells a lot of books is often confused with good writing.

What I have found from reading the best writers who wrote during the last century (book-award winners; Nobel Prize recipients), and from my own 30 years’ writing experience, is that the use of dialogue can be most powerful when used for 1) direct interaction between two characters (of course!), and 2) within or between narrative passages, thereby reinforcing the narrative; this use of narrative is spartan, a device (if you will) that energizes the narrative around which the dialogue is found.

John Updike uses this second technique often, and well, in his novel “In the Beauty of the Lilies.” At one point he develops five pages of dialogue to describe a young girl’s upbringing in small-town Delaware, how the family lives on its low income, where she plays, what her dad does to entertain her, what her mother does to instruct her. Central to this narrative development is the movie house in town, and what she remembers of being told about her grandfather, who found refuge in movie houses after his religious faith deserted him. At the end of this narrative we get this dialogue:

“On the walk home, they passed the Roxie, where ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL STARRING DEANNE DURBIN was spelled out on the marquee. ‘Please, Momma,” Essie begged. “I want to go.’

‘But Daddy and I can’t take you,’ her mother told her, in that singing, spaced-out, too-clear voice she used when being a mother. ‘I have to help Grandpa and Grandma in the greenhouse this afternoon, and Daddy and I are going to play cards with Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter this evening while Ama takes care of you and Danny.’ ”

The effect of this small bit of “talking” between mother and daughter is far weightier, more powerful, and says so much more about both Essie and her mother than if (by way of turning most of that narrative into dialogue) Updike had made the characters talk and talk and talk.

Writing dialogue is itself a careful task; the writer wants to effect the speech of THIS and only THIS character, while making the words ring true to any reader. To put so much importance on dialogue, then, to carry a story, is to dilute the power that rich dialogue can create for a story. If the writer doesn’t get that dialogue right, and right every single time, the story fails.

july 3, 2009

“Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.”

– Letter from Maxwell Perkins to Nancy Hale, circa 1932

“There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials; in the second place, there must be a command of words; in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in; and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures; this last is an essential requisite; for want of it many people do not excel in conversation.”

As much as we cannot want to intellectualize all subjects, we do find a need to challenge our friends, acquaintances, and even ourselves. We are social animals, and the need for interaction demands the need for conversation. “Never is there more a need for reasonable conversation than in today’s society, wherever people live.” Do you know where this quote comes from? It’s familiar, isn’t it? It comes from no one famous, in fact, because I just wrote it. Yet we have all heard something like it spoken or written somewhere. And, it cannot be more wrong.

Today is no more important, and likely less so, than the dark days of WWII; the blighted years of politically and socially banned books (pick your favorite century); 1,200 years of Catholic Inquisition combating “heresy”; or all of history’s oppression of women (no less objectionable to what is found today in India or throughout the Muslim Middle East and Africa). There has been, historically, a distinct lack of social conversation available to people where it could affect change. Much of the “good” conversation reserved itself inside senatorial houses, philosopher’s academies, monarchical courts, and those private chambers of the social elite.

Since the advent of the printing press, and, later, the establishment of largely parliamentary and democratic societies, people worked at making conversation a vital structure of society’s machinery. When governments failed, too often, at debate and compromise,at least the educated people demonstrated ample enthusiasm to conversation’s benefits.

In Parisian parlors of the 17th and 18th centuries, conversation came into its own. A whole coterie of parlor groups met, sometimes in secret, to discuss issues of the day, including politics, male-female relationships, sex (without the potty talk), and art of all kinds. For a time, most of those who met were women (of high means). The French were known already for their manners, their dress, their codes of honor (among both sexes). The women, it has been argue (“The Age of Conversation” by Benedetta Craveri) took it upon themselves to improve society (and their own positions within) by improving the manners and conversation of the French males. Success for women and society, on that smallish level, was great. Many of these parlor members kept diaries, and recorded conversations after a night of talk. Some have been published, but either have not been translated into English, or wallow away somewhere in a long-since out-of-print copy on a library shelf.

Over in England, in the middle half of the 18th century, Dr. Samuel Johnson had elevated conversation to somewhat of an art form. He had become famous for his “Dictionary of the English Language” (1755), and for writing twice-weekly essays under the title “The Rambler.” What Johnson might have lacked in oratorical compromise, he made up for in breadth of subjects he was willing and able to discuss. He particularly liked questions of liberty, and argued vehemently against changing one’s religion. Regardless of subject matter, Johnson demanded people bring knowledge to a conversation. Force of character and demonstrative positioning meant nothing if an argument did not come with humanist logic.

Today’s high-speed media environment could learn a lot from Dr. Johnson. The term “news cycle” has helped to fracture any attempt at sustained speech, or conversation. Sure, we have political and social talk shows, but too often they flounder in the sea of entertainment channels. And the American mind suffers from this lack.

While “The Simpsons,” “The Big Bang Theory” and “American Idol” achieve high viewer ratings — that turn advertising into gold dust — can we say they do something for conversation? Perhaps. And what is the difference between those entertainment programs and “60 Minutes” newsmagazine to initiate conversation? Any tense, psycho-political drama brings up important issues. An amateur-hour program can induce people to talk about what vocal art is … and is not. Exploring hot news topics or celebrity gossip can engage social discussion or reminiscences. But do any of these actually make discussion rather than seem to make discussion? Of course, we must not leave out the emergence of TWITTER and FACEBOOK. Conversation? Yes … but make it quick, because I’m stepping off the train.

If one looks at blogs, we find 4-5 sentence “posts” that often quote other sources (some spurious), or else link to an article written by—surprise!—a professional with a byline at a national newspaper or magazine. These posts are likely followed by shorter comments. Both resemble a nature that is difficult to define as conversation. Repetitive banter may more aptly describe their character. Nevertheless, one can argue, people are “connecting” where recently they were merely sitting in front of the television.

If there is yet conversation among us, and I think there is, it should get into the daily diet of all thinking people. I’m suggesting that people, if they are not doing so, get into the habit of talking about subjects that come to their minds, and not necessarily those in the news. Subjects that excite you, trouble you, irritate you (always a classic), or subjects you know little about but want to try to understand them through conversation with family, a lover, friends, colleagues.

I have my own suggestions: What thing of beauty have you seen today? How can you talk about that as art? Engagement with society is not a spectator sport, but something, I think, is of intrinsic importance to our individual lives.

january 18, 2012

“And this universal eligibility to be noble, taught everywhere, was what gave Simon airs of honor, Iroquois posture and eagle bearing, the lithe step that didn’t crack a twig, the grace of Chevalier Bayard and the hand of Cincinnatus at the plow, the industry of the Nassau Street match-boy who became the king of corporations. Without a special gift of vision, maybe you wouldn’t have seen it in most of us, lining up in the school-yard on a red fall morning, standing on the gravel in black sheepskins and twisted black stockings, mittens, Western gauntlets, and peeling shoes, while the drum and bugle corps blasted and pounded and the glassy tides of wind drove weeds, leaves, and smoke around, struck the flag stiff and clanked the buckle of the rope on the steel pole.”

– Saul Bellow, “The Adventures of Augie March”